Movie Breakdown: Gemini Man (Noah)
Pre-Screening Stance:
On one hand, Ang Lee is one of the great masters of cinema and everything he births into the world should be viewed on a giant screen in the holy dark of the church of cinema. On the other hand, someone convinced Ang Lee to make a movie where grizzled Will Smith fights a young version of himself. So, man, I don’t even know anymore.
Post-Screening Ramble:
You can almost see the draw of Gemini Man to a technological revisionist like Ang Lee. The potential of carving a character, a personality, a cinematic soul out of the raw material of 1s and 0s – it fits the bill of Lee’s late career turn towards experiment over narrative. Sadly though, Lee still hasn’t managed to find the balance between his love of cinematic advancement and his own strange and melancholic voice. Gemini Man is a rote action film, a stitched together ball of poorly written one-liners, undefined character archetypes and vaguely formed tropes. Will Smith plays Henry Brogan, a just-about to retire government assassin who, yup, has to return to the fold for ONE MORE MISSION. Of course, as the trailer tells us, this go-around involves his test-tube born younger clone and an intercontinental race to figure out why people are trying to kill him. Even writing a description of the film is difficult, because the more interesting threads (CGI Will Smith) are lost amongst the sheer boredom of just another action film. Lee’s style emerges time and again – a fight scene in the streets of Cartagena has a slow, poetic expanse to it – but it feels alien in the service of such an unoriginal film. In the end, it’s like watching a genius painter trying to make a paint-by-numbers canvas his own.
One More Thought:
Somewhere along the line I heard someone talking about how globalization is hurting the creative originality of films worldwide. That now we’re trying to make billions of dollars on a global scale, meaning our stories, our characters and our dramatic beats have to be bereft of any sort of cultural nuance so every culture can happily consume them. Gemini Man, partially produced by the Chinese Production company Fosun Group, feels this way. It’s a good, if not root-level unoriginal film stretched to the limits of enjoyment and credibility by a need to entertain, well, everyone.
