Considering Ang Lee’s Gemini Man in proximity of the first anniversary of its theatrical release

Mitchell Glidden

I.

To expand out past 24 frames per second; striving for a hyperreality. The bulk of film history is housed within this ratio—24 still frames amounting to a second’s worth of motion—a century-old standard, hardly flexible, enforced by exhibition technology and audience expectation. 24fps creates a standardized look (cinematic), begetting standardized lighting schema, performance, CGI integration… Experimenting with frame rate means experimenting with all of  cinema.

120fps is its own look, feeding the eye five times as many frames in a second as it would commonly consume, bringing forth an uncanny approximation of reality. Shooting at 120fps results in a rendering of the world much closer to the way in which the human eye perceives it (accepted exaggerations of the medium, such as perceivable motion blur, are erased), that still bears out the grammar and structures of a traditional cinema. Cinematography at 120fps is informed by this tension; that attempting to recreate reality is itself a gesture to film’s illusionary nature.      

II.

As conceived by Ang Lee and shot by Dion Beebe, Gemini Man (2019) was created to be, ideally, presented at 120fps, in 4K 3D, though no public cinema in the U.S. was capable of meeting these standards. Yet the project is not new—in fact dating back to 1997—associated with countless directors and male movie stars prior to being claimed by Ang Lee and Will Smith. Hollywood’s long-standing interest in Gemini Man likely stems from the relative blankness of its premise, a spectacle with enough space to accommodate auteurist personality in front of and behind the camera. Simply, Gemini Man follows an assassin who must come to terms with the existence of a younger cloned self; the story insists upon its major central visual effect and little else. Lee’s realization of the project respects this proposition, taking great care in bringing a younger Smith to life (a composite of CGI animation, facial motion capture, and a body double) while developing metaphor through and around him. So it is in this way that the extravagance of Gemini Man’s presentation parameters might begin to make practical sense, forcing the organic and artificial actor into the same piercing digital clarity—animated flesh beside the real thing—overcoming the disparity in their textures.

But in the process of making this CGI creation perform recognizably as human, there is an admission of incompleteness. Lee has developed a hyperreality wherein the artificial actor feels of a larger piece, but he has also inevitably created a simulacrum of a human—a convincing reproduction livened by Smith’s star persona, but decidedly less human beside the original. A fitting parallel to the narrative machinations for creating Smith’s clone, a plot of Clive Owen’s Erik Prince stand-in (Fed as abusive father) is aimed to develop a perfect soldier raised to be free of conscience. The technology used to produce the film becomes a device existing beyond its initial physical purpose, providing a poignant thread between state violence, abuse, and a reconciliation with post-analog media art.

III.

And this thread—held between “Politics”, “Family” and “Aesthetic”—tethers itself to points beyond the boundaries of Gemini Man’s runtime. Lee places these big concepts aside each other, and then, implicitly, aside themselves once more, as he’s done previously in his work. These are continuously expanding conversations, refined and reconsidered in anticipation of tech advancements and mass formal preference. There is Hulk in 2003, Life of Pi in 2012, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk in 2016… these films chart a course up through Gemini Man, seizing upon the expanses of the pop mode (i.e. money and audience) to tell stories of emotional specificity. With the exception of Life of Pi, these ventures into high-budget pop filmmaking have not provoked kind responses from establishment critics, nor the sort of financial returns appreciated by Hollywood (Billy Lynn failed to even make back its budget). These films, predicated on the classic Hollywood compromise, thought to use the pop mode and its conventions—not be burdened by them. 

Hulk anticipates contemporary superhero obsession, reckoning with the genre’s capacity for petulance and grand tragedy via the title monster, a motion-captured creature born of angst and childhood trauma. We see what will become Gemini Man here in 2003, CG tech merging organic and digital, transcending physical bounds while degrading authenticity. And Billy Lynn, between these two as a neat bridge, takes Lee out of science fiction and into what is most easily referred to as a “War Film.” A film of war at 120fps (the first venture), and of what comes after: PTSD, hollow media valorization. Unlike Gemini Man, Billy Lynn is explicitly set in our world; there are no digital Golems to be rendered real, instead it's the actual acts of violence that take on the hyperreal quality, insisting on the dissonance between Hollywood depiction and actuality. Billy Lynn’s cinematography is confrontational, conceived to reinstill cinematic violence with actual, sickening immediacy. The destruction of the human body becomes the film’s panicked fixation: digital bullets tearing through flesh with such speed and clarity that they reconstitute reality. It is no wonder audiences did not want this, nor that Lee would reconceive the implementation of his 120fps cinematography for Gemini Man, moving from the destruction of the body to the creation of them. 

But these films are not meant to counter one another, they are syntheses and reworkings of one another, new angles of a continued project. The films of Ang Lee, regardless of superficial genre indicators, function as melodrama, examinations of extreme emotion physicalizing in dramatic ways that implicate national identity. Gemini Man develops this conceit and then some, coaxing it out into a new cinematic space, this hyperreality that legibly stands in for a constructed set. This rounds out Gemini Man, cutting through the hypocrisy of critiquing the technology that the production is dependent on. The film concludes with Will Smith reclaiming his replicated self, but as family, resting the digital clone away from his deadening purpose within the Deep State and granting him his own future. It suggests a way forward: the simulacrum can be negotiated, we can embrace a hyperreality (do we not already live in one?). There is still so much to do.