Ang Lee's 'Gemini Man' (Will Smith)

[Hunter Rider]

I think that's either Junior or yet another clone of Henry.

Reading the article covering the 3 scenes you just posted, I think it's likely Junior.

 

[Hunter Rider]

@Pennywise

I saw a longer trailer for this with Hobbs & Shaw today, it had more in it than the ones posted in here, including a of shot Junior in the night vision mask and a longer look at the armored guy in the tank-like vehicle, I'd say it's definitely Junior.

 

[Pennywise]

@Pennywise

I saw a longer trailer for this with Hobbs & Shaw today, it had more in it than the ones posted in here, including a of shot Junior in the night vision mask and a longer look at the armored guy in the tank-like vehicle, I'd say it's definitely Junior.

 

[Lencho01]

 

[Pennywise]

Gemini Man Footage Reaction to Completely CGI Will Smith – /Film

Gemini Man Footage Reaction to Completely CGI Will Smith – /Film
If you had the chance to talk to your younger self, what would you say? That’s the premise, more or less, of Gemini Man, the upcoming sci-fi action film starring Will Smith…and Will Smith. Smith stars as an assassin named Henry who is being hunted down by a younger clone of himself, called Junior, sent to kill him by his former employer. Ang Lee directs the film in stunning 120 frames-per-second 3D, a feat that would already be impressive if not for the cutting-edge technology used to turn Will Smith into his 23-year-old self. But before you make comparisons to the “de-aging” technology used frequently by Marvel, Lucasfilm, and other studios, Smith wants to clarify: it’s not de-aging.

“The younger character is not me,” Smith said during a filmed Q&A screened after a footage presentation of Gemini Man attended by /Film. “That is a 100 percent digital character. A completely recreated character. They didn’t take my image and just stretch some of the lines. It is a completely CGI character in the same way that the lions in The Lion King are CGI characters.”

Smith’s dual performance is highlighted in the Gemini Man footage presentation, which /Film got to attend in New York City. The presentation showed three extended clips in 60 frames-per-second 3D (a step down from 120 but still in eye-popping high definition), which painted a fuller picture of what kind of action film Gemini Man will be.

It’s Smith’s performance you see as Junior in Gemini Man, done through a motion-capture suit that the Weta team then uses to build the assets to make Junior. The physical recreation of Junior is built with that and with reference material from the films of Smith’s early career like The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Bad Boys, and Independence Day. But the challenge facing the Oscar-winning director — who jumped at the chance to experiment with envelope-pushing technology following his 3D effects-heavy Life of Pi, and his polarizing high frame rate drama Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk — was not just to make an accurate recreation of Smith’s young face, but of his performance.


“He would tell me, ‘Act…less good,'” Smith said of Lee when he was directing him during his performances as Junior. Lee wanted a certain unease in Junior’s persona that reflected the acting talents of a young, less experienced Will Smith. It makes watching Junior in these scenes all the more odd and almost refreshing, because in the early days of his career, Smith wasn’t taking on any dramatic roles. In his 20s, Smith was charming audience in sitcoms, bombastic cop movies, and sci-fi action flicks. But in Gemini Man, Junior goes through an existential crisis, learning from his older self that he is a clone produced solely for the purpose of replacing the original. In the three extended sequences we watch, Smith pulls double duty not just as Henry and Junior, but in delivering both the hard-hitting action scenes and dramatic emotional monologues.


Here are our impressions of the three sequences shown at the Gemini Manfootage presentation.

Shoot First, Grenade Later
The first sequence opens in the sunny streets of Cartagena, Colombia, where an assassin prowls as Henry wakes after escaping his mysterious pursuer. Henry then tells a sleeping Danny Zakarweski (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Baron (Benedict Wong) that a sniper is on the roof, and that he will distract him so that they can escape. “You’re a ****ty houseguest, you know that?” Baron sullenly responds.


Henry cautiously ventures outside onto the dusty streets — the vibrant colors of the plaster walls and red tile roofs pop out in the high-frame rate 3D — and spots the sniper through a reflection in the puddle, shooting through his own shirt to draw his attention. Hiding behind a car, Henry loads his gun and points his sights at the killer, only to realize that the killer is a young version of himself. He hesitates long enough to get spotted, and he leads Junior into a villa for an all-out firefight that destroys the entire house. The two engage in a firefight for a few minutes before Henry yells at Junior that he doesn’t want to shoot him, to which Junior smoothly replies (in a way that very much recalls younger Smith’s outsized charisma), “Do you mind if I shoot you?” As Junior gets closer, Henry throws a grenade at him, only for Junior to shoot it away before it explodes.


Held Hostage
The second sequence is another action scene that also gains power from the high frame rate and subtle CG trickery. The scene follows Junior after he’s taken Danny hostage into an underground catacomb lined with human skills and bones. She nervously chatters to him, asking about his plan, which he sullenly replies to — though he gets a Nat Geo joke in there. Junior sets up a tripwire behind them before knocking out the lights, putting on a night vision mask and gas mask in anticipation of Henry’s attack. As Junior zip-ties Danny’s hands, he reveals that he was told that Henry had “cracked” and killed eight operatives, to which Danny explains that the operatives were sent by Gemini to kill Henry and her. Junior puts tape over her mouth before she can say more, but soon after the tripwire goes off and Junior is knocked down by Henry and disarmed.


Henry unties Danny, who lights a flare that lights the rest of the scene. Henry then explains to Junior that he doesn’t want to kill him, but save him. To convince him, he launches into a monologue about all of Junior’s tics and habits: he’s a virgin and longs for connection, he hates cilantro, loves puzzles and chess, suffers from insomnia, and the only time he’s happy is when he’s “on his belly, about to squeeze the trigger.” Junior is rattled but refuses to believe Henry’s revelations that Varris (Clive Owen), who raised Junior from infancy, had taken Henry’s blood and cloned him. Tensions rise between the two, and Junior attacks. The two get into a violent fight that — despite being half CGI — feels more hard-hitting and bruising because of the enhancements by the animators to make it look like the two are really making contact. The fight goes on for several minutes before they both fall down a shaft and into some water.


Daddy Issues
The third scene shows an emotional confrontation between Junior and Clayton “Clay” Varris. Junior demands to know why Varris, who he refers to as his father, cloned him. “I always believed you’d be happier not knowing,” Varris responds measuredly.

“He’s your darkness, you have to walk through this on your own,” Varris adds, explaining that the point of assigning Junior with the task of killing Henry was to give him Henry’s “gifts without the pain” of growing up without a father. Tears flow from Junior’s eyes, and Varris hugs him. While it is slightly apparent that Junior is a CG character — there’s a distance, or separation between him and other characters whenever they exchange dialogue — seeing a young Will Smith give an emotionally tortured performance is like discovering a lost performance from the actor’s early career. It’s unusual and it’s arguably even more amazing to see than the high frame rates and cutting edge technology.


“23-year-old me couldn’t have played this role,” Smith said during the post-footage Q&A, and that feels particularly true here.

 

[Pennywise]

10 movies you absolutely, positively must see this fall (from 'It 2' to 'Joker')

The skinny: The sci-fi action thriller stars Smith in dual roles as 50-year-old government assassin Henry Brogan, who is in the twilight of his career, and as the 23-year-old clone Junior sent to kill him. “I'm not that young anymore, so that really hit me,” Lee says about the film’s thought-provoking premise. Instead of de-aging Smith in post-production, Lee says Junior was created via Smith's motion-capture performance, with a personality that's a mix of his “Bad Boys” and “Six Degrees of Separation” characters, Smith’s own military dad and “his true younger self that only he knows.”

 

[terry78]

You can kinda see the various personas as Junior is kinda reckless, sarcastic, and easily emotional.

 

[Pennywise]

Some stuff from that Ang, Will, and Jerry talked about at the footage presentation last month.

 

[terry78]

That's a pretty bold statement to make.

 

[Pennywise]

This is very true, but I have hope that he'll give a great performance as Henry and Junior.

Also intrigued by 120fps. Hope it doesn't feel weird!

 

[DeadStroke]

This is very true, but I have hope that he'll give a great performance as Henry and Junior.

Also intrigued by 120fps. Hope it doesn't feel weird!

Henry seems like Will being Will. Junior seems like Will Smith doing Six Degrees of Separation.

I just hope it doesn't come off wrong because even though its fully CGI its still a 50 year old man acting 20 something.

 

[DarkKnight88]

I just hope it doesn't come off wrong because even though its fully CGI its still a 50 year old man acting 20 something.

Right, but that’s where the acting comes in. Tom Hanks acts like a 12 year old in Big and pulled it off without any CGI.

 

[Deck Rickard]

This just looks so... average to me. It looks like Looper if you threw out all the weirdness (and I didn't even think that movie was very good). It might just be Ang Lee... dude should stay away from sci-fi action movies because they're not his strength.

 

[terry78]

It's basically a vehicle for will Smith and the technology. Has any of his films really been that riveting without his charisma?

 

[Schlosser85]

This looks super bland and generic and out of the 1990s. Also Will Smith is charismatic and all, sure, but he’s really not that great of an actor and just kinda does his thing in every movie. Like Tom Cruise, his characters are Will Smith, rather than molding himself
to the characters. And the CGI might be good, but....ok? So are the effects in plenty of other movies.

 

[Pennywise]

 

[terry78]

Pretty good.

 

[Pennywise]

How the 'Gemini Man' visual effects team created a young Will Smith

Painting in the digital medium of ones and zeroes, today’s visual effects artists can conjure almost any creature imaginable. A flying elephant? Sure. A rampaging 400-foot lizard? You bet. Talking lions? Hakuna matata. For decades, though, one particular creature has remained stubbornly just out of their reach — and, in a cruel twist, it happens to be the one they see in the mirror every day.

In the visual effects community, creating a completely believable, photorealistic digital human being, capable of holding its own alongside flesh-and-blood actors for an entire film, has long been considered the holy grail. Films like “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “Tron: Legacy,” “Star Wars: Rogue One” and “Blade Runner 2049" have moved the industry toward that goal in recent years, with varying degrees of success. Now director Ang Lee is making the boldest — and riskiest — effort yet with the sci-fi action film “Gemini Man,” which pits the 50-year-old Will Smith, as a government hit man, against a 23-year-old version of himself.

For more than two years, Lee and some 500 visual effects artists have been working virtually nonstop to try to pull off a convincing facsimile of one of the world’s biggest movie stars as we haven’t seen him since he first burst on the scene more than 25 years ago. And until the film hits theaters on Oct. 11, they won’t be sure if they have pulled it off.

“From the start, I said, ‘This will be harder than we can imagine,’ ” Lee says. “Every shot is going to be under scrutiny. That’s really scary. I’m still scared.”

The idea for “Gemini Man,” in which aging assassin Henry is hunted by a younger clone who’s able to predict his every move, had been bouncing around Hollywood since the mid-1990s, waiting for the technology to catch up with the concept. In early 2017, producer David Ellison, whose Skydance Media had acquired the project from Disney a year earlier, pitched it to Lee.


Having created a CGI Incredible Hulk for 2003’s “Hulk” and a digital tiger for “Life of Pi,” the director was instantly intrigued both by the film’s technological challenge and its philosophical ramifications. “How a person deals with his younger self, two characters brought up differently but with the same genes — a situation like that just forces you to examine what we’re about,” says Lee, who has won the directing Oscar twice, for “Life of Pi” and “Brokeback Mountain.” “So I got down to figuring out how to do it. It was exciting.”

In recent years, visual effects artists have refined the ability to play God with the aging process in films like “Captain Marvel,” in which Samuel L. Jackson played a more youthful Nick Fury, and the upcoming Martin Scorsese gangster epic “The Irishman,” which will feature Robert De Niro and Al Pacino playing the same characters across three decades.

But because “Gemini Man” often involved Smith playing both characters in the same scene — and because Lee intended to shoot the film in a high-frame-rate format that would be less forgiving of any sleight of hand — the “Gemini Man” team had to employ an entirely different approach from the typical CGI-Botox-style “de-aging.”

“The term ‘de-aging’ usually refers to shooting the actor on set using makeup and then there’s a post-[production] process on top of that to smooth out wrinkles, thin the face, possibly graft in a couple of photographed skin pieces from a double,” says visual effects supervisor Bill Westenhofer, who shared an Oscar for his work on “Life of Pi.” “Whereas we are creating from whole cloth a fully digital human. In our nerdy world, the latter is a lot more difficult.”

To understand that difficulty requires grasping the concept of the “uncanny valley,” a phenomenon identified by a Japanese robotics professor in 1970 to explain why a not-quite-perfect representation of a human is so unnerving.

“There’s so much subtlety in expression; you can tell if someone is mad at you or happy with you,” says Weta visual effects supervisor Guy Williams. “If you create a digital human and you don’t get 100% of that nuance in there, your brain instantly starts to throw red flags saying it can’t quite understand what’s going on. If any one part isn’t right — the eyes, the lips, the shape of the nose, the head angle — the whole thing starts to crumble.”

Before production even began, Williams’ team at Weta began the process of building the clone, dubbed Junior, using for reference images and footage of young Smith from the sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” which launched in 1990, and films including 1993’s “Six Degrees of Separation” and 1995’s “Bad Boys.” In addition to closely studying Smith’s face and early performing style, they looked at research papers on the aging process to understand subtle physical changes, like how much the nose grows in adulthood. They pored over all the minutiae of the human face: the various types of melanin in the skin and how they interact with light, the different layers of the eyeball, how the lips stick together slightly when the mouth opens, the fine details of tooth enamel.

During production, the film was essentially shot twice, once on an actual set with Smith playing Henry opposite a stand-in for Junior and then a second time on a performance-capture stage, with Smith, wearing a body suit and facial camera, now playing Junior opposite a stand-in for Henry. Weta’s visual effects artists then collected the data captured from that second shoot and brought it together with the work they’d done digitally modeling the younger Smith to flesh out Junior.

Still, for all the high-tech wizardry brought to bear, the character remains firmly rooted in Smith’s performance. “Will had to get all of the nuances in the difference between his 50-year-old self and his 23-year-old self,” says Westenhofer. “There wasn’t a magical technical button for that part of the equation.” (“I couldn’t have played Junior at 23 years old,” Smith told reporters in July at a presentation of footage from the film. “Now I’m able to understand and capture both characters because of the amount of experience I’ve had as an actor.”)

For everyone involved — from the executives at Paramount Pictures, which is releasing the film, on down — the process of making “Gemini Man” involved a major leap of faith. There was simply no way to know whether this high-wire walk across the uncanny valley would work until it was too late to turn back.

“You could think about it, you could imagine what it may be like, but there was no example in life [to] visualize it,” Lee says. “Your heart is pounding for a year and a half, and then one day you see one of the shots and it’s really exciting. Then you still worry about the other 500 shots. It just takes one shot to take you out of the movie.”

In the end, the visual effects team behind “Gemini Man” hopes Junior will be so thoroughly convincing that the audience won’t have any sense of the endless hours of work and anxiety that went into bringing him to life.

“Our ultimate goal is to work ourselves out of recognition,” Westenhofer says. “If someone watches the film and says, ‘Will did a great job in that performance, and they did a nice job smoothing out his wrinkles,’ we’ll have pulled it off.”

 

[Pennywise]

Ang Lee’s ‘Gemini Man’ Locks in China Release in October

 

[terry78]

Yeah they want that coveted Chinese money.

 

[Pennywise]

 

[Pennywise]

 

[MOVIELORD101]

Why do i get the feeling the climax of this movie will involved the two Will Smiths teaming up to kick Clive Owen's ass?

 

[Schlosser85]

Why do i get the feeling the climax of this movie will involved the two Will Smiths teaming up to kick Clive Owen's ass?

One probably sacrifices himself to save the other or to take out Owen.

 

[MOVIELORD101]

One probably sacrifices himself to save the other or to take out Owen.

Yeah.