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Why was the CGI for Gemini Man so bad?
Will Smith’s entire career appears to be plagued by this issue. I, Robot and I Am Legend are two of the more extreme instances. In both situations, the CGI was substantially behind the curve in terms of technological advancement. Of course, bad CGI can’t fully unravel a fantastic film (see Blade for an example), but if the film isn’t otherwise excellent, bad CGI makes things exponentially worse. That goes even further if the entire plot is based on CGI, which Smith continues to do in his films for some reason.
Many of the sequences with little Smith (called Junior) are painful to watch since the CGI is so awful. Don’t be fooled by the flawless still shots; when the false/younger/CGI Smith (called Junior) speaks or displays emotion (and there is a lot of emotion), it simply looks fake. And, amazingly, the terrible CGI gets even worse during the Smith vs. Junior combat sequences. Those conflicts don’t appear to be real. There are around 10% of the time that Junior “doesn’t” look like an uncanny valley video game character. The most perplexing aspect of it all is that there are now deep phony videos that perform better than this film. Alita: Battle Angel is a great example of how to accomplish things correctly.
Is the movie Gemini Man a flop?
In the last decade, visual effects have come a long way. The Advanced Imaging Society gave Gemini Man the Entertainment Technology Lumiere Award in September for its use of ground-breaking technology. On a business level, though, Gemini Man demonstrates that new visual effects concepts don’t always pay off. The emphasis on technical aspects may have overwhelmed the plot, resulting in Gemini Man’s failure.
What are your thoughts on Gemini Man’s visual effects? Is there anything else you’d like to see? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
Is it worthwhile to watch Gemini Man?
Sex and Skin: This isn’t the kind of action thriller with wild hot sensual scenes in between all the fighting, which is refreshing. A huge age difference between a graying leading man and a fresh young ingenue, for example. That is one advantage Gemini Man has.
Our Opinion: Oh, how I wished Gemini Man was a wonderful guy! What a bizarre, soulless film with so much promise squandered. The decision to shoot it at 120 frames per second (the average movie is 24!) results in an odd, hyperrealistic effect that makes you feel like you’re watching a computer game unfold. The set pieces in the film are surprisingly lackluster, and the performances are lifeless. It also makes the cloning technique look a little less credible. This isn’t my biggest criticism of Gemini Man, but it is a significant flaw that could have made it shine as a riveting thriller.
A gimmick isn’t enough to keep a film going. That is the reality. While seeing how far technology has progressed is thrilling and mind-boggling, Will Smith and his clone are unable to make Gemini Man work on their own. The narrative is clumsy and occasionally makes you roll your eyes; the scenes involving the clone’s discovery and origins are actually uncomfortable to see it feels like something out of a basic screenwriting class. We don’t want our food spoon-fed to us. We’ll be able to sort it out. It would have been a lot better film if Gemini Man had allowed us do a little more of the study ourselves. Instead, it opts for a brilliant light show that leaves you feeling quite empty by the end, providing an enjoyable but forgettable (and somewhat terrifying?) view into the future of cinema. But what about the story? There isn’t much of that around here. And there aren’t many excuses with a director and cast like this.
It’s not that Gemini Man is particularly rude or difficult to watch; it’s exactly the kind of movie you’d leave on the TV while doing other things, or choose if it’s available for free on an aircraft. It’ll suffice. It’s entertaining. It could have been a wonderful, thoughtless summer popcorn movie with a few changes. But, at an era when top-notch, emotionally gripping action films are released in droves, Gemini Man falls short. It simply lacks the necessary heart.
SKIP IT, is our recommendation. While the technology and graphics are unquestionably stunning, Gemini Man lacks a personality (or much of a script). It’s a shame, because the concept is genuinely quite intriguing at its core, but a gimmick can’t salvage a movie. While it may be suitable for airplane watching, only a few minutes of this film reveals why it was stuck in development purgatory for two decades.
Why does the action in Gemini Man appear to be strange?
The issue is, movies aren’t real, and attempting to make them real only serves to highlight how unreal they are. Our ability to suspend disbelief, which is required for the art form to function, is lost. The image’s smoothness and clarity don’t make us feel like we’re sitting in a room with the Gemini Man characters; instead, it makes us feel like we’re suddenly sitting on the set with the Gemini Man performers, watching them struggle through their lines. Yes, we see more details, but not always the proper details; some of my friends who saw Gemini Man at 120 frames per second grumbled about the film’s uncomfortable product placement, such as nicely lit Coke cans; I didn’t notice these at 24 frames per second. Worse, the film’s second significant innovation, the fabrication of a digital, younger version of Will Smith to portray Junior, is jeopardized by the high frame rate. We can clearly discern the character’s limited range of expression at 120 frames per second.
The somewhat dreamy, unreal frame rate of 24fps, it turns out, provides a required filter a cognitive distance between the viewer and the image, and that little dreamy, unreal characteristic may well be important to conjuring the illusion of cinema. The traditional frame rate has spawned an entire lingo. The movie enterprise would fall apart without it. I interviewed David Niles, an engineer and pioneer in HDTV technology, earlier this year for an article on motion smoothing. (I’m not going to delve into the differences and disputes between motion smoothing and high frame rates, but I believe it’s safe to say that, in its ideal condition, a motion-smoothed image would appear like a high-frame-rate image.) Niles informed me about tests he’d done where he showed the identical footage to viewers at varying frame speeds. “We’d record a sequence with two performers at 60 frames per second, or even 30 frames per second, and then shoot it at 24 frames per second and show it to audiences to see how they perceived it,” he explained. “People loved the actors better with 24 frames – they thought the performances were better.” This was essentially the same experiment I conducted on myself when I saw Gemini Man twice.
The strange thing is that Ang Lee is aware of all of this. He recognizes that increased frame rates necessitate a new approach to cinematic language. He recently told IndieWire, “It’s a separate media with different perceptions, different expectations.” “Digital isn’t interested in being film; it wants to be something else.” I believe we need to move past it and figure out what it is.” Ang Lee, on the other hand, with his solemn, classical film style, his passion for lengthy takes and gorgeous close-ups the same qualities that, in my opinion, make him such an important artist of our day is perhaps the major director least suited to attempting to make high frame rates work. Despite its thrilling action sequences, Gemini Man is mostly a classic drama, shot in a traditional style and played in a traditional manner. It’s an Ang Lee flick, after all! It has no right to be shot or displayed at such high frame rates.
There is a model for how high-frame-rate movie could function. Many independent films and documentaries were shot on high-end digital video cameras in the late 1990s and early 2000s, before high-definition cameras became commonplace in motion-picture production. These cameras were often shooting at slightly higher frame rates NTSC video ran around 30fps in the United States, whereas PAL video ran around 25fps in Europe. The filmmakers were well aware that these images did not have the appearance of celluloid. Even if you had the resources to adapt your footage to 35mm and screen it at 24fps, the resolution was inferior and the frame rate gave the visuals a distinctively un-film-like look.
If you choose a traditional shooting method for those early digital-video movies, your footage began to resemble a soap opera. People developed a more vrit approach, depending on handheld shots, fast-cutting, and intense, frequently fragmentary close-ups to get around the video difficulty. (The Dogme 95 movement influenced this style as well, with its slightly tongue-in-cheek “vows of chastity” for production processes.) As video allowed for more intimacy onscreen, parts of performance began to shift; the so-called “mumblecore” movement also emerged at this time. Intriguingly, the “shaky cam” aesthetic used in many mainstream studio films does as well. Michael Mann’s Collateral and Michael Mann’s Miami Vice both of which were shot by Dion Beebe, the cinematographer of Gemini Man take advantage of both the you-are-there intimacy and the frantic fragmentation of digital video.
Is Junior in Gemini Man a computer-generated character?
Using technology to de-age performers is all the rage in Hollywood right now, with anything from Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman to creating a young Nick Fury for Captain Marvel. However, one future movie appears to be following in the footsteps of those other films in terms of de-aging. Will Smith portrays two identities in Gemini Man (released Oct. 11): Henry, who is 51 years old, and Junior, a clone who is roughly 30 years younger. While Smith played both roles, the Gemini Man character Junior was fully produced with computer graphics.
“Aging is a difficult process. It’s a fact of life. As a mark of appreciation, we must reconstruct a youthful Will Smith… For that, I believe we need start from the beginning “At a conversation in New York City on Sept. 18, director Ang Lee discusses his decision to develop a wholly CGI character. “Don’t get me wrong,” he says with a giggle, “I believe he’s still gorgeous.”
There’s a considerable difference between de-aging someone using visual effects and creating a completely CGI persona. De-aging is achieved by filming the action and then editing the actor’s face. In Ant-Man, for example, Michael Douglas’ visage was digitally merged with that of a younger stand-in actor to create a younger version of his character.