Hacker Cinema
Gemini Man
2019 · Film · 117 min
Directed by Ang Lee
Henry Brogan is an elite 51-year-old assassin who's ready to call it quits after completing his 72nd job. His plans get turned upside down when he becomes the target of a mysterious operative who can seemingly predict his every move. To his horror, Brogan soon learns that the man who's trying to kill him is a younger, faster, cloned version of himself.
4 negative2 mixed7 neutralfrom 13 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
Videos commenters linked
From YouTube links in the comments below. Most are clips and trailers; “Full” means the uploader says so.
14 comments on Hacker News
You have never seen a movie at 120fps. Gemini Man exists at 60fps and that is as close as you are going to get. That blu-ray is controversial due to that fps. I thought it was neat, but it 100% looks and feels different than other movies.
> Nobody else has 4k 3D HDR with HFR
Sadly that content basically doesn't exist outside of computer games.
I got myself a 240 Hz OLED HDR monitor and I wanted to see Gemini Man in 120 fps, but it turns out that this is unobtainable by the public. The only other HFR movie I'm aware of is the Hobbit series, but they're only 48 fps.
It's a bit weird to me that I have an ordinary consumer camera that can capture 120 fps or 8K at 60 fps, but that content fidelity exists only in YouTube or Vimeo.
I remember first watching 4k HDR films (I remember gemini man in particular) and it looked different from previous films and I had to adapt.
maybe too high res? Or maybe HDR eliminated artifacts like bloom or something that seemed to make it too perfect.
TLDR:
Gemini Man, a movie with low ratings and reviews, did better than expected on Netflix.
Honestly it’s easy because a directors job is harder to replace than an actors job. The studios weren’t losing much.
So far, in the last couple of years we’ve already seen what are basically CGI actors - current actors de-aged in three major movies - Samuel Jackson in Captain Marvel, Will Smith in Gemini Man and Harrison Ford in the latest Indiana Jones.
Not to mention Mark Hamil in the Mandalorian.
How are you going to replace Steven Spielberg, Kevin Feige, etc?
> No one is bringing a raw Blu-Ray signal into the back of their TV over Ethernet though— Netflix's 4K streams cap out at around 16mbps, which is a tiny fraction of that.
Who cares about internet streamers? Plenty of us definitely are bringing raw Blu-Ray signals in to the back of our TV over ethernet. Disk space is cheap, transcoding is slow and lowers the quality, so when I rip my movies I just do what the pirates call a "remux" where I keep the exact same audio and video streams as are on the disc and just slap them in to a MKV container for my convenience.
It's not super common for UHD Blu-Rays to crack 100mbit/sec but the spec allows for up to 144mbit/sec. I've casually looked in to it in the past and AFAIK Gemini Man is the current leader, with regular spikes to the 120mbit/sec range and one scene transition actually violates the spec by my count, hitting over 150mbit/sec.
Gemini Man was a poor movie, but it was really interesting how it tried to use and explore the opportunities offered by high frame rate. I'm 100% in the club of people who can barely look at 24fps pans on the big screen, and wish 48fps and higher became the norm, were explored deeper so they could find solutions for the "soap opera" look - most likely figuring out a new look.
I think the real reason HFR isn’t used much in cinema is that it ends up exposing a lot of the choreography, set design, special effects, etc. as fake, where before our brains filled in the details due to the low information rate and blurry frames.
Watch either of Ang Lee’s HFR movies (Billy Lynn/Gemini Man) and you’ll understand what I mean. HFR breaks suspension of disbelief. I didn’t want this to be true but I’ve come to accept that it doesn’t really have a place in cinema at least for now.
If you're asking why movies aren't shot at 60 fps instead of 24/23.976 fps, there are "HFR" movies shot at higher frame rates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_with_high_frame_rates
From what I can find as I write this, the only movies distributed at high-framerates on Blu-ray are Gemini Man and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.
Although HFR is technically an improvement, not everyone's a fan of the "feel". Relevant HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14616930
I don't think the holds. When Sony bought Columbia there's an apocryphal story of the USA executives explaining the business to the new Japanese owners and saying "We make 20 movies and only 1 is profitable". The Japanese executives talked to each other in Japanese and then replied "Please only make the 1 profitable movie". In other words, the mis-understood that the USA executives were trying to tell them they don't know which of the 20 movies is going to be a hit.
Going back to 2019 (so taking COVID out of the consideration), "Dark Phoenix" tanked, cost $200 million. "Gemini Man" tanked, cost $172 million. Plenty of 30-70 million dollar movies that didn't do well.
This page list 680 movies that came out, no list of budget but only around 1/6th made 10 million and I'm sure there's a long list of the ~500 that made less than 10 million that cost more than 10 million to make.
https://www.the-numbers.com/market/2019/top-grossing-movies
also important to remember the 1.5 hour Marvel film almost certainly took more human hours in the input side than virtually any video game
This is simply wrong.
Marvel movies (and indeed, most studio releases) are generally produced and released within a year or two. Only the biggest blockbusters have crews in the hundreds, and it is rare for a movie to have a crew in the thousands. For example, Endgame is one of the most expensive movies ever made...and production and post-production (i.e., VFX) took less than 2 years. Dune (2021) was filmed and post-produced in under 2 years. Tenet, Nolan's most technically complex film, was actually filmed and post-produced in just over 1 year. (But contrast to Avatar 2 and 3, which have been in production for over 4 years and counting.)
On the other hand, almost every AAA game of the last decade has spent years in development with a crew of hundreds for almost the entire time. For example, Red Dead 2 was in development for 7 years. Starcraft 2 was in development for over 5 years. Destiny was in development for 4 years.
Note that the above timeline does not include pre-production work (like writing the screenplay, casting, hiring crew, raising funds) because in the movie industry pre-production work proceeds very slowly (for example: Avatar 2 was in pre-production for 7 years; Gemini Man for over 20 years), but the actual production and post-production (i.e., the actual making of the movie, editing, FX) happens at a lightning pace. In the game industry, the creative parts happen in tandem with the development of the game itself.
Also note that while movies can have large crews, the different teams aren't all working at the same time; for example, film crews and other production crews rarely interact with the VFX or other post-production crew.
I watched Gemini Man 4k/60hz/HDR and it was really weird to watch.
It felt more like reality tv than a cinematic movie, and I'm uncertain if it was the HDR or the 60hz.
Unfortunately the fact that lower budget TV was recorded onto tape at 60fps in the old days of analog television has effectively ruined high frame rate for everyone.
Gemini Man just came out at 120fps in Cinemas and 60fps on blu ray and regardless of your feelings about the quality of the film, I would have thought anybody with eyes could appreciate how amazing the high frame rate looks.
But no, it’s all people moaning about how it looks like a soap opera and “so unnatural” (too lifelike).
It seems anyone who tries high frame rate is crucified for it, so directors aren’t exactly incentivised to try again.
Gemini man is a better example of where this is heading.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5y4kxhZIBA
A DF has a pretty specific meaning if you are diving into the technical aspects. It's an approach that has a lot of specific limitations that put a practical ceiling on how good it can be. For example, it's a 2D system that won't capture lighting differences with good accuracy. The limitations become more apparent as resolution increases.
Newer systems use source material to generate 3D facial models. The face in the target video is also 'motion captured.' The target video's lighting is estimated and a resulting face image is rendered and composited into the target. That's a lot closer to the pipeline of movies such as Gemini man.
So while DF isn't a technique used in movies, machine learning is heavily involved. It's built into model generation, motion capture, animation, etc. Artists will start with captured/generated assets and hand-tweak them to get the desired result.