快猫短视频

Film

Directed by Ang Lee

鈥淵OU made a person!鈥� cries Will Smith, tearful, stressed and 25 years younger than he ought to be. 鈥淥ut of another person! And then you sent me to kill him!鈥�

In Ang Lee鈥檚 Gemini Man, he is facing off against his adoptive dad Clay Verris (Clive Owen), who makes perfect soldiers for a living 鈥� or tries to. Smith鈥檚 鈥淛unior鈥� is his latest wheeze.

Why Junior must kill his 鈥渃lone-father鈥� Henry Brogan, an exhausted hitman also played by Will Smith (this time at his real age), is never made entirely clear.

Junior wants answers, as do we all, though it is obvious by now we aren鈥檛 going to get them 鈥� not from a script that has been kicking around Hollywood for nearly 20 years, and not from a director whose bleached, hectic, high frame-rate cinematography lends walls and machinery greater physical presence than faces.

Gemini Man hurls itself into not one, but two gaping logic holes. First, the film relies on the idea that human cloning is inherently menacing. But who in their right mind would be afraid of a mere clone? We deal with far more serious incursions of the uncanny every day, from the bodiless ubiquity of digital personal assistants like Alexa to the creepy, co-evolutionary, pals-for-ever antics of our pets. There is also the not inconsiderable challenge of other people, many of whom behave quite differently to us.

鈥淲ho would be afraid of a mere clone? We deal with more serious incursions of the uncanny every day鈥�

The only film that ever made clones scary was The Boys from Brazil (1978), in which a Brazilian clinic starts churning out copies of Adolf Hitler. Even here, the hero comes to realise the clones themselves are utterly harmless and it is the Nazis who should be commanding our attention.

Problem number two: by the time you have made your 鈥減erfect soldiers鈥� flexible enough to do the job that you want them to do, you will have given them enough agency to disobey you. This bind has driven the plot of much good robot-infused literature, from the synthetic human鈥檚 birth in Karel 膶apek鈥檚 1920 play R. U. R. to its entanglement in some famous puzzle stories by Isaac Asimov (whose three laws of robotics are basically three laws of slavery with a sugar coating).

Algis Budrys set the capstone on this sort of tale in 1954 with the short story 鈥淔irst to Serve鈥�, in which a government engineering team is driven round the bend in the effort to create an obedient military robot. 鈥淗aven鈥檛 you got it through your head?鈥� a researcher cries in exasperation. 鈥淧immy鈥檚 the perfect soldier 鈥� all of him, with all his abilities. That includes individuality, curiosity, judgment 鈥� and intelligence. Cut one part of that, and he鈥檚 no good. You鈥檝e got to take the whole cake, or none at all. One way you starve 鈥� and the other way you choke.鈥�

A word about Gemini Man鈥�s de-ageing technology, which supposedly took 20 years of development before it could make halving someone鈥檚 age entertaining.

First, it didn鈥檛. David Fincher used it to makeThe Curious Case of Benjamin Button in 2008. Second, it needs a script to make it work. Martin Scorsese鈥檚 recent film The Irishman is so involving, you never notice that the young Robert De Niro鈥檚 face is wobbling about on a more than 70-year-old body. Third, Will Smith looks way better now at the age of 51 than he did as the Fresh Prince of Bel Air back in the 1990s.

Hit the gym, dear readers, you have everything to live for.