Here’s an astute critical analysis: Ang Lee’s new film Gemini Man looks real weird. There’s honestly no more elegant way to state that the film, a sci-fi action thriller about cloning, is just a downright strange looking movie. Which oddly both elevates and does disservice to what is otherwise a mildly engaging, if pretty conventional and familiar, adventure. Its experimentation stops at the threshold of its drama, which gives the movie a lopsided gait.
What makes Gemini Man look so odd? Well, for one, Lee returns to the high frame rate technique he employed to pretty much disastrous effect in his last film, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. It’s been a few years since that movie, and the technology has been improved some in that intervening time. But still, Gemini Man’s ultra-crisp, you-are-there images give the movie the pallid glare of a cheap soap opera while also imbuing the film with a tingle of something else, something eerie and unnatural and not-right. I’m not sure I understand the mental arithmetic that figures audiences are starved for movies that are this unadorned of hue, of texture, so hyper-real, that they look like elaborately staged home videos. I think there’s still a hunger for style, for the transporting ability of a beautiful moving picture. Lee may crave this stark new vision in his own filmmaking, but he’s so far having trouble selling it to anyone else.
There are moments in the film—which was screened in 3D—when this garish method does actually kinda sorta work. During a deftly, crunchingly choreographed chase scene through the narrow streets of Cartagena, there’s something almost perversely enveloping about the film’s unnerving immediacy. It makes us more closely consider all the physics of what’s happening, maybe, seeing its violence as a scary disruption of the everyday status quo, rather than a natural part of a more polished action movie’s narrative sweep. But mostly, yeah, this frame rate thing still feels like an unnecessary mutation, an attempt at fixing something not really broken.
Gemini Man’s optic assault doesn’t stop there, though. To really earn his extra credit in film wonk class, Lee has also given himself the task of directing Will Smith as a 51-year-old and Will Smith as a 23-year-old. The trailers have pretty much already spoiled this: a competent government assassin finds himself challenged, and nearly killed, by a younger version of himself. Smith plays both of these characters, with a heap of computer effects aiding him the process.
Do they actually aid him, though? I just grappled with big-budget de-aging technology when watching Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, and was surprised by how relatively seamless it was in that film. And for a decent portion of Gemini Man, I mostly felt the same. Huh, one thinks, watching this smooth-faced entity. He does actually look a bit like Fresh Prince-era Will Smith. And what a welcome, if melancholy, return to nascent stardom—and, sure, the bloom of our own youths—that is. The film almost becomes a comment on Smith’s movie star profile, an actor admitting he’s aged, considering his past while still proving his current mettle. (And, not for nothing, 51-year-old Will Smith looks way better than the fake 23-year-old.) Lee is careful to shroud the artifice in darkness; we get some steady, held glimpses of the computer-massaged face, caressed by shadow, but then it goes disappearing back into the darkness, or into a thrash of movement. Gemini Man survives surprisingly long on such ungodly magic.
Until, well, it really doesn’t. Eventually the film has to show us the day-lit fullness of its creation, and when that happened in the film, well, I only exaggerate a little when I say that I wanted to make the sign of the cross at the screen and banish that monstrosity back to the hell it surely came loping out of. The way this faux-person walks and tilts his head and greets a friend. Ugh. It’s all so stilted, so creepily off in some fundamental, if ineffable, way that it mars everything that’s come before it. Gemini Man is frustrating like that; just as you think you’ve inured to its pushy, insistent technicals, they betray you with an ugly flash of realization.
