8/16/2023 0 Comments Gemini man qualitiesA whole vernacular has developed around the classic frame rate. It turns out the not-entirely-real frame rate of 24fps provides a necessary filter - a cognitive distance - between the audience and the image, and that slightly dreamy, unreal quality may well be essential to conjuring the illusion of what we call cinema. At 120fps, we can clearly see the character’s limited range of expression. More distressingly, the high frame rate also undermines the film’s other great innovation: the creation of a digital, younger version of Will Smith to play Junior. Yes, we notice more details, but we don’t necessarily notice the right details some of my friends who saw Gemini Man at 120fps complained of the film’s awkward product placement, such as its perfectly lit cans of Coke at 24fps, I didn’t notice these. The smoothness and clarity of the image doesn’t make us feel like we’re sitting in a room with the characters from Gemini Man, it makes us feel like we’re suddenly sitting on the set with the actors from Gemini Man, watching them struggle through their lines. Our suspension of disbelief - the very thing that we need for the art form to work - dissipates. The thing is, movies aren’t real, and when we try to make them real, we realize just how not-real they are. Joe Alwyn as Billy Lynn, in all his high-frame-rate glory. The hyperreality of the image had the countervailing effect of making everything else seem phony: the acting, the makeup, the sets, even the stunts and the CGI. It’s the same thing that happened with Billy Lynn. But in this case, realistic does not always mean better. real life) and the illusion of motion (a.k.a. And a high frame rate does make for a more realistic image studies have shown that when processing higher frame rates, the brain starts to lose its ability to tell the difference between real motion (a.k.a. There’s no denying that there is something impressive about being able to see all sorts of tiny details in such sequences. So, Gemini Man is filled with scenes designed to showcase this technology besides the Cartagena motorcycle chase, there’s also a dimly lit fight in the catacombs of Budapest, as well as a final melee involving a mysterious masked super-soldier doing crazy, rapid-fire kung fu. Proponents of high frame rates (like Ang Lee and Peter Jackson, who shot the Hobbit prequels at 48fps, and James Cameron, who was once reportedly intending to shoot the Avatar sequels at 120fps) believe that this provides clearer, smoother, more realistic images, particularly when it comes to depicting fast movements, adding a level of detail that 24fps struggles to capture. None of it worked, business-wise: The film has proved to be a massive flop, and seems set to lose its studio $75 million. Many screens - more than a thousand of them, in fact - did show it at 60fps, which is still a high frame rate, though not quite as high as Lee intended. were apparently even capable of showing it at that frame rate. To be fair, not all that many people saw Gemini Man at 120fps - that is, if they bothered to see it at all - since only 14 theaters in the U.S. Even the explosions felt weirdly small and inconsequential. At a higher frame rate, though, the grandeur of the big screen suddenly evaporated, and the whole thing seemed … if I may use a scientific word, dinky. When I saw Gemini Man for the first time at 24fps, as a regular old movie in a regular old movie theater without any fancy new technology, it actually worked okay. Like his previous feature, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Lee shot Gemini Man using allegedly-revolutionary-but-mostly-confounding high-frame-rate technology - in this case, filming at 120 frames per second instead of the traditional 24 frames per second, which is what pretty much all movies have been shot at since the dawn of the sound era. Oddly enough, this second time, I was watching Gemini Man in the director’s preferred viewing format. Will Smith’s anguished, breathless responses were programmed and unconvincing, as if he’d suddenly forgotten how to act. His movements seemed fake and cartoonish. Suddenly, I could tell that Junior was largely a digital creation. This time, the same chase felt flat, lifeless, phony. The chase was dizzyingly fast - dazzlingly, disorientingly so - and I do believe I winced and yelped audibly at one point when Junior whacked his older self with the rear of his bike.Ī couple of days later, however, I saw the film again. The first time I saw the film, I was wowed by its action set pieces, in particular a wild motorcycle chase through the streets of Cartagena in which 51-year-old assassin Will Smith is relentlessly pursued by a deadly 23-year-old clone of himself nicknamed Junior. God help me, I watched Ang Lee’s Gemini Man twice. It would be silly to blame the film’s failure on the technology, but I’m going to go ahead and blame the technology.
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