Tag: IMAX

Gemini Man

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Henry (Will Smith) is a mercenary sniper so skilled that, in this film’s bravura opening sequence, he can shoot a distant target through the carriage window of a fast moving train. He’s getting on in years, though, and has decided to retire because he feels he’s losing his edge. He should have shot the mark in he head not the neck, and he could so easily have shot by mistake the inquisitive little girl who was briefly standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

No matter, he’s retiring and plans to spend his time sailing on the open sea and generally doing nothing. He hasn’t yet realised that the target sold to him as a terrorist was, in fact, innocent – and consequently he”s about to become a target himself. Moreover, because his skills are unrivalled, his employers represented by Clay Verris (Clive Owen) have cloned him, raising the clone to capitalise on his strengths and improve on his weaknesses. And to eliminate him, they’ve sent his clone – a younger, leaner, hungrier and arguably more efficient version of himself.

Thus, the film is basically old Will Smith hunted by young Will Smith with, as is the way in Paramount action thriller franchises from Mission Impossible to Jack Reacher, a female companion thrown in for good measure, here in the form of Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Benedict Wong plays an old friend of Henry.

It seems we haven’t quite reached the point yet where an actor can be scanned into a computer as in The Congress (Ari Folman, 2013) and turned into a career’s worth of movies. Young Will Smith is played by the actor and then changed into a younger, leaner version of himself via reference footage of himself in old movies and mountains of CGI work. It’s impressive; you really feel like you’re watching a real life, younger Smith. Ang Lee is, after all, the man who pushed effects technicians to create the central character of Hulk (2003), a technically groundbreaking if flawed film. There as here, he’s pushing at the limits of the medium and learning all the time as he goes.

As if that wasn’t enough innovation for one movie, Lee here redefines the action movie deploying the combination of 3D and HFR (High Frame Rate of 120 fps) that he employed on Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2016) although it was shown in only five cinemas around the world in that format (New York, Los Angeles, Taipei, Beijing and Shanghai). It’s not clear exactly how many cinemas will be able to play Gemini Man in the exact format Ang Lee intended – see here. Sadly, not every director is Ang Lee and as with 3D, there will no doubt be a rash of not very good 3D + HFR movies so that ticket prices can be upped. A rash of run of the mill 3D movies is why 3D is now widely looked down on.

So, what’s so impressive about this particular movie in 3D and HFR, then? Well, Lee thinks about every shot in terms of 3D, conceiving it as not a flat photographic image but sculptural, three dimensionally blocked out, staged action – whether that’s two people talking in a room or an above the water / under the water shot of two fighting people falling a couple of storeys into water. On top of that, the increased number of frames per second makes everything feel more real, and when you’re talking about fast paced action stunt work that actually makes a considerable difference to your viewing experience. My question on emerging from the press screening, for the record at London’s Cineworld, Leicester Square on the digital Imax screen, was, “What exactly have I just watched?” (I’ve been unable to ascertain what frame rate was used at that screening, although it felt much higher than 24 fps.) If all directors were as talented as Ang Lee, the answer would be, “the future of cinema”. One can but hope.

Gemini Man is out in the UK on Friday, October 11th. On VoD in March. Watch the film trailer below:

Ad Astra

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), under constant psychiatric evaluation to check he’s still up to the job, must journey first to the Moon, then Mars and finally to a space station at the far reaches of the solar system to stop his father Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), a hero explorer officially declared dead having disappeared who is unofficially believed to have turned rogue. Power surges emanating from the vicinity of his father’s last known position are causing severe disruption to and may eventually destroy all human life on Earth.

That’s the essence of James Gray’s simple story, fundamentally a father and son tale with shades of Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979). The film was written in collaboration with Ethan Gross, and the images of space travel and tech hardware are effectively realised.

The father was the leader of an expedition called The Lima Project to make contact with extraterrestrial life, a cause about which he was passionate. Because you already know (from the trailer, below) the father is played by Tommy Lee Jones, you also know he’s going to appear at least in flashbacks, comms messages and imaginings inside the hero’s head if not in the main, real time narrative.

The son is an isolated, self-centred individual. He’s away from home most of the time and his partner (played by Liv Tyler) scarcely gets a look in – either in their relationship or, indeed, in the film itself. And he needs to be isolated and self-centred in order to complete the mission on which he’s been sent – and of which he wryly observes at one point, “they’re using me”.

The Earth – Moon – Mars – father? trajectory is the main narrative spine. Roy travels with a series of different companions and ultimately alone as he heads towards whatever awaits him at his journey’s end. The episodes en route to and at the Moon in particular recall 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) although given that film’s lengthy prehistoric apes opening, some may consider Gray’s narrative narrower in scope.

Roy’s first companion is Colonel Pruit (Donald Sutherland) who travels with him to the Moon. Pruit knew Roy’s father and is one of the few people briefed with full details of Roy’s top secret mission. The octogenarian Sutherland plays Pruit as an adviser and guru, a substitute father for Clifford who left home on his one-way mission when Roy was a teenager.

Mars base supervisor Helen Lantos (Ruth Negga, just as good here as she was in British indie outing Iona, Scott Graham, 2015) later delivers him to the launchpad for the final leg of his journey after he fails a psychiatric evaluation.

The spectacular, opening action set piece has an interplanetary pulse cause an explosion on a huge man-made structure in Earth’s upper atmosphere. Roy falls off, perilously plummets towards and ultimately parachutes down to the planet’s surface. The threat facing the Earth and our hero’s ability to perform calmly under extreme pressure are both clearly discernible.

That tension is felt throughout the film which, as lovingly lensed by Hoyte Van Hoytema the cinematographer of Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014), varies between vast shots of space, ships and interiors that you’d expect in a film like this and intense close ups of Pitt plumbing the psychological depths of his own inner space and spirituality. On a digital IMAX screen, which is highly recommended for full appreciation of this particular movie, both sets of Ad Astra’s images prove spectacular.

It’s light years away from superficially similar space travel sci-fi which recently played cinemas Aniara (Pella Kagerman, Hugo Lilja, 2018), about an enclosed society coming to terms with the vastness of space rather than a single individual doing so.

Ad Astra delivers further full blown action sequences for those who want that sort of thing – a multiple Moon buggy battle inspired by the Mad Max franchise (George Miller, 1979, 1981, 1985, 2015), a distress call from a seemingly lifeless vessel complete with subsequent shocks comparable to Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) – although the film seems both more on track and more original when, for example, lone hero Roy must negotiate a series of underground tunnels to perilously board from below via its rocket thrusters a NASA style space rocket on its Martian launch pad. There’s even a passing nod to Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013) when he travels through an asteroid belt in nothing but a spacesuit and a makeshift, handheld shield.

Further originality can be heard in Max Richter’s eerie, atmospheric score – a very different proposition from either the classical music selection in 2001 or Hans Zimmer’s pounding electronics in Interstellar – which perfectly fits the film’s double themes of the vast emptiness of space and the dark depths of the human soul.

There are many reasons why you should watch this fascinating sci-fi flick. Leaving aside the considerable twin pleasures of seeing ageing legends Sutherland and Jones acting on separate occasions in close up on an IMAX screen, not to mention Negga’s impressive turn, there’s also Pitt’s impressive portrayal of an isolated individual coming to terms with his absent father. At the same time, as a space exploration epic it compares favourably to both 2001 and Interstellar with special effects, cinematography and score to match. Altogether, a magnificent piece of work.

Ad Astra is out in the UK on Wednesday, September 18th. On VoD in April. Watch the film trailer below:

Your Name (Kimi no Na wa)

Posted on by mjbstaging

In a spectacular and bravura single take, vertical panning shot, a meteor descends from the heavens through the clouds towards the small lakeside town of Itomori. Then, another time, another place: on a train in Tokyo a teenage girl spots a boy and their eyes meet but there’s no time to exchange names. She knows him but he has no idea who she is. As she gets off the train, he asks her… “Your Name?”

Thereafter, Tokyo boy Taki wakes up some days Mitsuha’s body, and the other way round. Soon, each starts writing the other messages on their hands, arms and mobile phones so that the other one knows what he/she has been up to while they swapped bodies. Until one day, her messages stop.

Like the falling meteor which unexpectedly splits into a shower, at once a beautiful display in the Tokyo night sky and an impending disaster in Itomori, this weaves together two ways of looking. Girl and boy. Countryside and city. Celebration and catastrophe. As a ribbon snakes through space and meteor fragments fall through the atmosphere, a thread weaves through a loom meshing separate timelines. When the two teens meet at the beginning, she is near the end of their encounter while he is at its start thanks to subtle storytelling sleight-of-hand. They may not both know each other yet, but they are connected. When finally they meet again on urban Tokyo hillside steps, the moment is poignant.

Although the meteor is expected to fall in one piece, at the last minute it splits into fragments, one of which will wipe out Itomori. After learning through Taki that this will happen, can Mitsuha and her friends alert the town – busy celebrating its annual festival – to evacuate before lives are lost?

Japanese films have dealt with disaster for a long time, most notably in Godzilla (Ishiro Honda, 1954) which turned the devastation of the A-bomb into the eponymous, city-wasting monster. Recent reboot Shin Godzilla (Hideaki Anno, Shinji Higuchi, 2016) shows the franchise still capable of delivering such myth and metaphor.

Not that Your Name is necessarily about nuclear strikes. Japan has a long history of earthquakes and associated natural disasters, most recently the 2011 tsunami and resultant damage to the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Life goes on but such disastrous events linger in the national psyche and inform popular culture. Even as Your Name absorbs Itomori’s annihilation into its wider culture as a pretty light show over Tokyo, it grapples with the magnitude of the disaster by placing us in the immediate days and hours beforehand.

Elsewhere, Your Name plays out as both teen romance and dual exploration of male/female identity. The two protagonists wake up separately in each other’s bodies to discover with a mixture of delight and embarrassment that they possess the genitals of the opposite sex. As the twin narratives move on to explore more psychological sexual differences, the body swap device proves genuinely affecting. By the time of the impending annihilation of Mitsuko’s home town, you’re completely hooked.

It’s one of those rare movies to watch multiple times. If, like this writer, you saw it last year in a small cinema, to catch the new digital IMAX print on a bigger sized screen is a real treat. While scenes with minimal detail and movement show up the fact, other sequences are all the more effective. This applies not only to the big outdoors vistas where you’d expect it but also more intimate, everyday scenes. In short, compared to much smaller screens, the IMAX format allows Your Name’s visuals the room they need to breathe.

Your Name is out in the UK on Wednesday, August 23rd.

For another animation about Japanese life against the backdrop of impending disaster, click here.

Dunkirk

Posted on by mjbstaging

British filmmaker Christopher Nolan – now one of the highest-grossing film directors in history, with the Dark Knight Trilogy under his belt – has created a complex and multilayered film that cleverly interweaves three separate narrative strands: 1) on land over a week a young soldier (Fionn Whitehead) after he arrives alone at Dunkirk beach and falls in with others (including the music superstar and heartthrob Harry Styles); 2) on sea over a day a small, requisitioned, civilian boat (crew: three) go to bring home trapped combatants; and 3) in the air over an hour three Spitfires fly a sortie. Nolan is fascinated by time and runs these in parallel so that an incident partly revealed in one strand is later retold in another revealing more. There’s a constant sense of the clock ticking differently in the three time frames: mind-bending and exhilarating stuff.

The impressive analogue 70mm IMAX version puts you in there as if you’re escaping death on the way to the beach or in a Spitfire cockpit shooting at/being shot at by the enemy. It has everything you expect from a big screen war movie that small scale drama Churchill lacks. It’s a remarkable insight into the dirty side of being part of a war. The issue is survival: if not everyone can be rescued, who will be? The top brass organising the operation led by Kenneth Branagh must confront this issue to transport the maximum number of men home.

For those who are not familiar the events, the film depicts the Dunkirk evacuation of Allied soldiers from the eponymous beaches and harbour of France, between May 26th and June 4th 1940. It is believed that the extremely risky and unexpectedly successful operation saved the 330,000 British, French, Belgian, and Canadian troops from almost certain death under the surrounding German Army. Hence the “Miracle at Dunkirk” accolade.

As in the best horror films, anyone can die at any time. Not that this is a horror film. English soldiers are gunned down by French friendly fire. Spitfire pilot Tom Hardy’s broken fuel gauge makes him reliant on the pilot in the next plane relaying how much fuel that plane has left. Civilian boat captain Mark Rylance sails into a war zone with no weaponry or means of defence so he can rescue combatants. Shell shocked soldier Cillian Murphy completely loses it and injures someone trying to help him.

Men trapped in a beached boat are fired on from outside the hull by unseen assailants. People are trapped in spaces large or small which water threatens to fill cutting off their air supply. Swimmers covered wholly or partially in oil from crashed aircraft are forced to choose between staying underwater and not breathing and coming up to breathe when an inferno rages above the surface. Life and death situations.

Nolan manages some worrying tilts at British society circa 1940 which resonate today. A young soldier reaches the beach and joins a queue to be told to go elsewhere as this line is reserved exclusively for the Grenadiers. Another soldier who doesn’t speak much is accused by others of being a German spy. And an airman who nearly drowned in action is asked by an embittered evacuee, “where were you when we needed you?” British conformism, value judgments and prejudice are alive and well in the fight for survival. But so too are heroism and being prepared to give one’s life in the fight for a better world. Britain, now as then, is both good and bad.

Dunkirk, however, is consistently good. In fact, it’s likely the most impressive film you’ll see this year. It’s out in the UK on Friday, July 21st (2017). See the analogue 70mm IMAX version at BFI Waterloo London, The Science Museum London or Vue Printworks Manchester if you can.

On Amazon Prime on Thursday, April 1st (2021). Also available on other platforms.

Watch Dunkirk‘s two IMAX trailers below:

And here:

And click here for our review of another British historical film set around the same time, and still out in some UK cinemas.