“Gemini Man” is a special film for Will Smith fans, because the star can be seen in a double role – and in one of them thirty years younger. How was this done?
The film fell through with critics, but most viewer reactions online were surprisingly positive – and if you’re a fan of Will Smith and his acting, you couldn’t avoid “Gemini Man” in cinemas in 2019. In the action thriller from the successful director Ang Lee (“Brokeback Mountain”, “Life of Pi”), Will Smith plays a 50-year-old professional killer named Harry Brogan, who suddenly has to go on the run shortly before his retirement when a young and well trained colleague is assigned to him, the almost 30 years younger Junior – also played by Will Smith.
Junior is Harry’s clone, which ages just like a normal human and is now supposed to replace his original. And so there are several scenes in “Gemini Man” in which Will Smith fights against Will Smith. To do that, were several impressive tricks necessary.
Duplicate Will Smith: The Tricks of ‘Gemini Man’
Even the most negative reviews of “Gemini Man” had to admit that the Special effects an incredible achievement scored. Young Will Smith looked absolutely convincing. The effects surpassed everything that had been seen in cinemas in terms of “rejuvenation”. For example, in the superhero blockbuster “Captain Marvel” it was possible to rejuvenate Samuel L. Jackson by 30 years, or as convincing as the young Robert De Niro appeared in the mafia epic “The Irishman” – these tricks have never worked 100 percent before. Somehow you recognized then as good as always the use of computers behind it. And “Captain Marvel” and “The Irishman” came out in the same year as “Gemini Man.”
In these films, Samuel L. Jackson and Robert de Niro had their scenes shot normally, and then their faces were extensively edited with computer tricks. Wrinkles were removed, the skin tightened, etc. In “Gemini Man” a different approach was taken. Young Will Smith is not a digitally rejuvenated actor, but a computer-animated character from the ground up. Instead of animating existing material, special effects genius Stuart Adcock and his team created a “new actor” from scratch.
Is ‘Gemini Man’ starring Will Smith the future of Hollywood?
Paramount Pictures, Montage: TVSpielfilm.de
Will Smith plays two roles in Gemini Man.
This technique, which is all the more complex, was chosen because there are too many scenes in the film in which the two Will Smiths interact directly with each other – and it would have been difficult for him to play both roles. Still, Will Smith and his talent flowed into the digital junior. Smith pre-created each Junior scene in a purpose-built studio using motion capture, which means: Special cameras recorded each of his facial movements and created a digital copy of it. In this way, the facial expressions of the real Will Smith could later be transferred to the digital Will Smith. Basically, it’s the very technology that Andy Serkis used to play Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies. In principle, Will Smith’s mimic work could have been placed on any other digitally generated face.
Is “Gemini Man” the beginning of a new era? Until now, motion capture has mainly been used for non-human characters, such as Gollum or the apes in the recent “Planet of the Apes” trilogy. However, the fact that it is now possible to create an actor completely on the computer that is so believable and invisible to the eye and then enrich it with real acting material could, in a few years completely new possibilities in the cinema care for. The technology is currently still very complex and associated with high costs, but technical progress in these areas is progressing rapidly. It could soon be possible for completely fictitious actors to appear in films or for biographical feature films to have stars slip into the roles of long-dead people who can no longer be distinguished from their real counterparts.
So even if not everyone finds “Gemini Man” successful: It’s worth taking a look at the film – if only for one first impression of the possible future of cinema to get.
