Double Vision

GEMINI MAN - It’s Will Smith versus Will Smith in Ang Lee’s wildly ambitious, technologically ground-breaking action thriller…

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This movie is a leap of faith,” says Ang Lee, with the nervous laughter of a man who’s just spent millions of dollars stepping into the unknown, and is about to show Teasers the fruits of his labor. No stranger to the boundary-pushing technological vanguard, his latest film, Gemini Man, arrives later this year with a full suite of movie-making bells and whistles: native 3D, 4K resolution, 120 frames per second photography… Oh, and the most realistic digital human ever committed to film.

No, your eyes aren’t playing tricks, that is a fully computer-generated, 23-year-old Will Smith you see above these words. Unlike digital de-aging, which uses the actor as a basis and (to put it very simply) smoothes out the wrinkles, Gemini Man’s ‘Junior’ is driven by Smith’s performance, but has been built from scratch by the visual effects wizards at Weta. “That’s not my skin that they just stretched,” says Smith. “The level of the work is so spectacular. It’s like… look, y’all aren’t understanding how good we are! The team at Weta has done something that’s really never been done before.”

There’s a simple reason why it’s never been done before: it hasn’t been possible. And not through lack of trying. First sold to Touchstone Pictures – a dormant division of Disney – by screenwriter Darren Lemke (Goosebumps, Shazam!) in 1997, Gemini Man