Gemini Man (4K UHD)

Director: Ang Lee

Screenplay: David Benioff and Billy Ray and Darren Lemke (story by Darren Lemke and David Benioff)

Stars: Will Smith (Henry Brogan / Junior), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Danny Zakarweski), Clive Owen (Clay Verris), Benedict Wong (Baron), Douglas Hodge (Jack Willis), Ralph Brown (Del Patterson), Linda Emond (Janet Lassiter), Ilia Volok (Yuri Kovacs), E.J. Bonilla (Marino), Victor Hugo (Junior On-Set Reference), David Shae (Bicycle Messenger), Theodora Miranne (Jack’s Girlfriend), Diego Adonye (Henry’s Dad)

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Year of Release: 2019

Country: U.S. / China

In Ang Lee’s Gemini Man, Will Smith, with the assistance from a small army of digital technicians and animators, plays two characters: a 50-year-old master assassin on the verge of retirement named Henry Brogan and a 24-year-old man known only as a Junior who has been secretly cloned from Henry’s DNA. In the film’s opening sequence, Henry has been dispatched by his handler, Jack Willis (Douglas Hodge), to take out a man on a speeding bullet train in Belgium. He has been told that this man is a dangerous bioterrorist, and he does as instructed. However, he later learns that he has been duped into killing an innocent biologist at the behest of Clay Veris (Clive Owen), the shady government operative who trained him to be the world’s best killer. Because Henry “knows too much,” he must be taken out, and after others fail to get the job done, Clay dispatches Junior to kill him. Thus, Henry’s clone—his younger self, in effect—is sent to take him out, and neither one knows who the other is until they find themselves face to strangely familiar face.

For most of its run-time, Gemini Man is essentially a long international chase film, with Henry trying to escape the death order that has been placed on his head. He is aided and abetted by Danny Zakarweski (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a young agent who was tasked with monitoring Henry until she learns of his predicament and becomes a target herself, and Baron (Benedict Wong), an old friend who is the kind of guy who can fly planes, knows people, and has hiding places all over the world. Junior’s relentlessness in tracking Henry reflects Henry’s own dogged professionalism, which has taken him to the end of his line (the opening assassination was supposed to be his last—the final hit that always turns out not to be the final hit). The screenplay by David Benioff (Game of Thrones), Billy Ray (The Last Tycoon), and Darren Lemke (Goosebumps) has a few third-act tricks up its sleeve, partially regarding the life-and-death relationship between Henry and Junior, but for the most part it is a tried-and-true genre rundown, taking us through a series of exotic and extremely photogenic locales while Henry tries to stay alive and figure out who is tracking him and why.

Along the way Ang Lee and cinematographer Dion Bebee (a regular collaborator with Michael Mann and Rob Marshall) stage some genuinely thrilling actions set-pieces, the best being a high-speed motorcycle duel through the narrow streets and along an imposing seawall in Cartagena and later a bout of intense fisticuffs in the skull-encrusted catacombs beneath an towering castle in Budapest. The climax occurs in a small town, with the quaint main street turned into a war zone as Clay brings out his own army of masked killers, one of whom wields a high-powered machine gun that literally shreds anything in its path. Because Lee is decidedly more interested in human drama than he is explosions and gunfire (although he is very good at choreographing the latter), every battle and every fight in Gemini Man carries with it an existential heft, as we are made acutely aware that Henry is literally himself. The conflict is literally both internal and external, and Lee spends just as much time with the characters in deep conversation as he does with them battling it out. Just as he did with his much maligned comic book adaptation Hulk (2003), which was an interesting failed experiment, Lee is attempting to add dramatic and thematic gravitas to a genre known primarily for its surface thrills. He wants to push the envelope, not just in terms of pyrotechnics, but also in terms of the human dimension. To that end, his work with Will Smith is duly impressive, even if half the time we’re watching a computer-generated approximation of the multi-Oscar-nominated actor.

Which brings us to Gemini Man’s most challenging dimension: its heavy reliance on digital effects and Lee’s decision to shoot the film in 4K video at the extremely high frame rate of 120 fps (standard film speed has been 24 fps since the early 1930s). The digital effects are mostly excellent, with the digital Will Smith playing a quite convincing role opposite the real deal. There are times when the seams show, as creating a completely digital human being with dramatic weight inseparable from flesh and blood is arguably an unattainable goal, but the digital artists working behind the scenes have come almost frightening close, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t convinced most of the time. More problematic, though, is the film’s high-frame-rate cinematography. Lee previously experimented with this technology in his war drama Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2016), as have other filmmakers (most notably Peter Jackson in his Hobbit trilogy), but he seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of its effectiveness. The high frame rate produces ultra-sharp, highly detailed images that lack motion blur; thus, they do not look like traditional cinema, but rather like a video game. The effect is one of hyper-reality that is unnaturally crisp and sharp and almost mechanical in its feel; the irony is that the ability to capture fine detail transcends our normal perception and renders the image fundamentally artificial, which is completely at odds with Lee’s desire to make an action film that is physically robust and dramatically powerful.

Gemini Man 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Aspect Ratio	1.85:1
Audio	English Dolby Atmos English Dolby TrueHD 7.1 surround Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 surround French Dolby Digital 5.1 surround French (Canada) Dolby Digital 5.1 surround Italian Dolby Digital 5.1 surround Japanese Dolby Digital 5.1 surround Thai Dolby Digital 5.1 surround
Subtitles	English, English SDH, French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Cantonese, Dutch, Korean, Malay, Mandarin (Simplified), Thai
Supplements	VFX Scene Breakdown Alternate Opening Deleted Scenes “The Genesis of Gemini Man” featurette “Facing Your Younger Self” featurette “The Future Is Now” featurette “Setting the Action” featurette “Next Level Detail” featurette “The Vision of Ang Lee” featurette
Distributor	Paramount Home Entertainment
Release Date	January 14, 2020

COMMENTS
Gemini Man was originally shot on the Arri Alexa SXT-M and Phantom Flex 4K camera systems in 3D 4K at 120 frames per second—more than five times the standard frame rate of 24 fps, which has defined the look and feel of cinema since it was standardized in the early 1930s. The presentation on Ultra HD Blu-ray was taken from the 4K digital intermediate and rendered at 60 frames per second, since that is the max that most 4K TVs can manage right now. This is a first for a film presented on home video, so it is something of a watershed moment, although I can tell you that I did not like how it looked at all. I found the presentation’s razor-sharp image, lack of motion blur, and strange sense of physical movement immensely distracting, to the point that it was taking me out of the film experience. Watching it on the included Blu-ray at 1080p/24 fps was a much better experience for this reviewer, although I submit that some viewers may appreciate the high frame rate presentation and I applaud Paramount for including it. I just think it looks phony and distracting. I can say that the image on both the 4K and 2K discs is bright, robust, and finely detailed and boasts amazing colors saturation, particularly in the Cartagena street scenes. Black levels, shadow detail, and contrast are all impressive, as well, and have quite an impact on the fight scene in the murky catacombs. I just could not get into the film in the 60fps presentation, and I wish there were a way to view it in 4K without the high frame rate (I also understand the cost prohibitions in including multiple discs in the same package). The Dolby Atmos surround soundtrack is an unqualified knock-out, with incredibly immersive surround effects, a thundering low end, and amazing sonic detail in both the hectic fight scenes and the moments of relative quiet. Almost all of the supplements are housed on the Blu-ray disc, since virtually all of the storage on the Ultra HD disc is taken up with the film itself. However, there is a fascinating 4-minute visual effects breakdown featurette presented on the 4K disc, in which we see clips from the big action scenes that show us what is digital and what is real. It’s a great lesson in how many digital effects are slipped into scenes that we never even consider to be computer-generated. On the Blu-ray disc we get an alternate opening sequence that cuts back and forth between Henry’s Belgium assassination and Junior assassinating a man in a moving car somewhere else, two deleted scenes (“I Found a Plane for Us,” which is less than a minute, and “Original Yuri Scene,” which runs nearly 4 minutes), and a series of making-of featurettes that run more than an hour total: “The Genesis of Gemini Man” (3 min.), in which producer Jerry Bruckheimer, director Ang Lee, and star Will Smith discuss the film’s long road to the screen (to give you an idea, it was originally intended for Clint Eastwood); “Facing Your Younger Self” (6 min.), which focuses on the film’s thematic elements and what Smith had to do in order to play two versions of the same character; “The Future Is Now” (18 min.), which looks in-depth at the digital effects needed to create a convincing Junior interacting with Henry; “Setting the Action” (16 min.), which looks at the film’s use of actual locations and the fight choreography, pyrotechnics, and stuntwork; “Next Level Detail” (4 min.), in which production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas (Inception) takes us through the catacombs set, which was designed and built from the rubbery ground up; and, finally, “The Vision of Ang Lee” (6 min.), in which the director and his collaborators extol the virtues of using the high-frame-rate technology (for the record, Lee says he shot 120 fps for the 3D presentation, but when the film is presented 2D, he prefers 24 fps).

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

Overall Rating: (3)