Ang Lee is trying to reinvent the technology of cinema and Gemini Man is his latest attempt. Dan Slevin investigates.
Will Smith and Mary Elizabeth Winstead in Ang Lee’s Gemini Man. Photo: Paramount
When asking himself the (usually rhetorical) question, “What is theatre?”, the comedian Rik Mayall used to answer, “I don’t know, ask Vanessa Redgrave!” Now, when I’m tempted ask myself the question, “What is cinema?”, one director I won’t be asking is Ang Lee (two-time Oscar winner for Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi).
Because Lee seems determined to break cinema, or at least to create something new that bears as much relationship to cinema as instant coffee does to … well … coffee. And that his new cinema will one day become the reason why we leave our homes to sit in large dark rooms with strangers, to watch flickering lights on distant walls. In Lee’s the world the lights will flicker so quickly we won’t even realise they are flickering.
His latest film, Gemini Man, a thriller starring Will Smith as an ageing hitman forced to tackle a clone of his younger self in order to survive into retirement, features some heavy duty digital effects from Weta Digital that create a photorealistic version of the young Smith for him to spar with, but that’s neither here nor there in this discussion. Nor will I worry too much about the rights and wrongs of the film as a whole, as I expect my colleagues to cover that beat effectively enough.
No, I’m interested in whether Lee’s championing of the still-rare High Frame Rate technology is going to be enough to get future audiences out of their living rooms, where the viewing experience for movies, TV and sport is getting better all the time.
One of the 428,400 frames that Dan sat through. Most citizens only saw 171,360. Photo: Paramount
Gemini Man is shot in 4K 120fps 3D. At those rates, I hesitate to even use the word ‘shot’ as so much of the work is being done by computers rather than lenses. Normal film is, still, 24 fps and 2D. 24 frames per second is the standard that was developed back in the days when celluloid film itself was fiendishly expensive and producers had to standardise on the lowest speed that could crank through the camera that at the same time capture recognisable human movement.
That was around the time of World War I and the movies became so popular that we learnt to love that subtle flicker as every 24th of a second a new – still – frame would appear before our eyes and our brains would create the illusion of movement. It’s magic, truly.
But filmmakers would get frustrated with the medium’s limitations. Motion blur – which is the effect of reducing image clarity as a character runs across the frame or when the camera pans horizontally – is the loss of information and some directors hate that. According to Wikipedia:
“A few film formats have experimented with frame rates higher than the 24 fps standard. The original 3-strip Cinerama features of the 1950s ran at 26 fps. The first two Todd-AO 70mm features, Oklahoma! (1955) and Around the World in 80 Days (1956) were shot and projected at 30 fps. Douglas Trumbull’s 70mm Showscan film format operated at 60 fps.”
In 2012, Peter Jackson persuaded cinemas all over the world, who had by now transitioned from film to digital, to play The Hobbit at 48 fps – double what we were all used to, at least in cinemas. But, video gamers (and people who had left their default motion smoothing settings on in their TVs) were less surprised.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Will Smith in Gemini Man from Paramount Pictures, Skydance and Jerry Bruckheimer Films. Photo: Paramount
Since then, only Ang Lee has tried to develop the technology, determined that greater realism would result in greater excitement. Combined with 3D, high frame rate does create a hyper-realistic image. In Gemini Man, the day-time sequences in Belgium and Colombia are extremely colourful and ‘glossy’. In the night-time catacombs battle, set in Prague, some of the shots are breathtaking – especially under water.
Lee, himself, believes that he is still learning a new film grammar to go along with the new technology. How long do you hold a shot before you cut? How do you coach the actors when the camera can see inside their very pores, if not their souls? What do you do to sound, to make it match the ‘reality’ of what you are seeing when – even with the flash new Dolby Atmos system, to our brains most of the sound is still coming from behind the screen? A screen that you become far less aware of visually.
Also, what is the business model for this new technology? From my investigations, not a single cinema in New Zealand was able to play Gemini Man in 120 fps – the preferred format. I saw it in 60 fps in Wellington and I’m struggling to imagine what doubling that would look like. 3D sessions of most films have been fewer and further between in recent years as audiences resist the sometimes uncomfortable glasses and extra expense.
Evidently, some cinemas around the world were showing Gemini Man in HFR 2D which makes no sense to me – a more luminous and realistic 3D would have to be the point of the exercise, surely?
Anyway, we won’t have too long to wait before the experiment comes to life again. Lee is making a boxing movie, Thriller in Manila, next year and James Cameron has announced that he making all his Avatar sequels in the new format – meaning that they will all look as buttery smooth as the first one did when it was a JB Hi-Fi demonstration disc for new TVs.
Gemini Man is in general release now, but you will have to ask your local cinema carefully what format they are playing it in. It’s also rated M for violence and offensive language.
