Get excited, ladies! Robert Pattinson returns to theaters in two weeks in Remember Me, a romantic drama about two star-crossed, NYU-attending lovers (Pattinson and Lost’s Emilie de Ravin) canoodling their way around New York before graduating, getting married, having babies, and living happily ever after. Or so the trailer would pretty much have you believe! Some folks on the Internet were talking today about the film’s big surprise twist, and we got curious, so we did a little investigating. Want to know how Remember Me ends? Read on! Spoilers ahead, obviously!
Are you sure you want us to ruin this for you? If not, you should definitely stop reading now.
Here it is: In the absence of any time-marking signposts, viewers are led to believe that Remember Me is set in the present — but it’s really 2001. At movie’s end, after having a fight with de Ravin, Pattinson’s character takes an elevator to his father’s 92nd-floor office on a bright September morning, looks out the window, and watches helplessly as American Airlines Flight 11 hits the building. That’s right — Robert Pattinson dies in 9/11.
(An early draft of the screenplay [reviewed here] was even craftier about laying the groundwork for its twist: Pattinson’s brother, Michael is killed in the World Trade Center attacks eight years before the movie happens, but we learn in the final pages that Michael actually died in the 1993 bombing.)
The movie’s title and Lower Manhattan—showing official poster hint subtly at a downer climax (as does this slightly less subtle fan-made one), but since we’d have never figured it out if we’d not read the end of the script, we bet it’ll be a surprise to most Robert Pattinson fans the weekend of March 12. We’d imagine this will start some interesting post-movie discussions.
