Gemini Man (2019) Dolby Vision review. HDR metadata: P3 colour primaries. 1000/0.0010 nit max/min mastering display level. Max Content Light Level 5180 nits. Max Frame Average Light Level 1577 nits.
Gonna talk about the movie first, if you want to get to all the techy shit then scroll down like 5 paragraphs.
Let's just get this out of the way: I love HFR and I don't care who knows it. Now, I don't want to see most 24p films retrofitted into HFR any more than I would stick my hand in a blender and flip the switch, but holy shitballs HFR works like gangbusters on new stuff for me. It's like you're watching it live rather than refracted through whatever inherently 'unreal' visual stylisations the filmmakers have opted for (with a couple of exceptions, which I'll get to later). Different strokes and all that, there's a million and one creative decisions that can be made when shooting a movie and as long as it's germane to the story that's being told then I'm happy with whatever. And with Gemini Man there's a crazy sense of immersion and immediacy that the HFR brings to it, at once I just 'synced' with it (rewatching Billy Lynn's again recently was a big help in that respect) and simply enjoyed the film from there on out.
Maybe it's just me, that I actually dig HFR rather than having some kind of pathological hatred of it, but I thought the action scenes looked terrific in terms of their actual appearance in 60p HFR. People talk of the fight scenes looking horribly staged, that the motorcycle chase looks like it's going about 5mph, that the actors themselves seem like they're doing amateur dramatics but I got NONE of that when watching it. Seriously. I'm not saying other people can't feel that way but I'm the exact opposite.
The combat scenes are breathlessly swift (though encumbered by the usual western techniques of editing the crap out of them, not even HFR can do anything about that), the Colombia chase had me gripping the armrests on my chair as they zip through the streets and even the acting I thought was enhanced by the HFR, not lessened. Clive Owen's terrible in it, sure, but he's been phoning it in for years while everyone else does rather well IMO. There's a moment on Jack's boat when he hears something outside and his happy expression leaves his face and he goes for his gun, the last thing to sag on his mush is the area just under his eyes and it's wonderful to see that level of control that an actor has over their instrument, on the 24p BD it happens all too subtly to appreciate.
HFR brings up all those little tics and as Ang Lee is so obsessed with the human face (dude loves them close-ups, not just here but in many of his movies) it's not surprising that he hearts HFR so much. I
am surprised that we got several little bursts of slow motion in the movie though, as IIRC Ang or someone else on the Billy Lynn's production noted that slow motion was designed so we could see things that 24p wouldn't otherwise capture, so they rhetorically asked 'what use does it have in HFR?'. Now we know: it can be used stylistically to remind us that we
are still watching a movie.
The VFX on Junior is quite simply remarkable. Not perfect, as digital artists still seem to be engaged in a perennial struggle to animate the area around the mouth without it looking too rubbery, but there are plenty of moments where he looks nothing less than 100% photo real and in 4K HFR (and HDR) he damn well needs to! When Henry shines the light on him in the catacombs, oh mai. Admittedly the face replacement on the stunties looks rubbish but it rarely works well at 24p never mind in HFR so I can let that go. The end sequence does look bad (as mused upon upthread it was probably a rush job for a reshoot) but other than that Junior is a gobsmackingly good piece of VFX wizardry, driven as much by the performance as the pixels, and as a result I truly believe in Junior as a character which is probably why I also enjoyed the movie so much. Of course it's regulation Hollywood bollocks but, as Sweetie will tell you, I love pimping trash and I makes no apologies for it. More MEW in movies is also very high on my list of priorities, it gets an extra star just for her kicking some ass.
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Okay, as for the actual UHD it's sensational. It's a bit grittier than Billy Lynn's because that was shot on the 8K Sony F65 while Gemini was captured on regular Alexa at 3.2K and uprezzed to 4K, so you get more of a patina of noise as a result. Not a bad thing as it gives it a bit of texture, especially in the darker scenes, without breaking into the immersive 'you are there' aspect of the HFR. Detail still looks insanely good, not overly sharpened but so damned dense for detail if you ever wanted to count the pores on Will Smith's nose, well, now's your chance. Acuity drops off a bit in the darker scenes but again, not a problem.
The HDR is supremely effective, not just in the usual way of pulling down highlights in brighter areas (though it stops short of resolving every little thing, it still kills the SDR Blu) but it really makes a difference to the intensity of the lighting itself, I challenge you not to squint when Henry shoves the flare into Junior's face in the catacombs! Smaller points of light look similarly vibrant like the little torches that adorn the assault weapons and some of those explosive/incendiary blasts during the finale are incredibly bright too. As wowsome as the minigun sequence is I was just as impressed by a simpler shot of MEW in the catacombs holding a lit flare along with her weapon, it just looks so realistic.
Colour is nice without being overpowering, using the production design to add splashes of colour rather than attaching an overwhelming tint to the visuals themselves, like the environs of Cartagena with all those quirky pastel coloured buildings. As is so often the case the 1080p SDR version of the film adds a subtle yellow tinge which saps some of the essence of the colour in that version e.g. fire leans towards that typical jaundiced SDR look while the HDR grade makes it look rich and orangey, as well as resolving more highlight information of course.
Blacks are fine, they're deep to the point of rolling off a bit more shadow detail than I'd like as the darker spots on hair and clothing can drop off to nothingness, but one thing that I adored was the usage of good old-fashioned 'day for night' when shooting the nighttime exteriors. It's very rarely used any more (Fury Road being another example) but I find it so effective, and now that I live out in the sticks where it gets real dark once the streetlights turn off it's crazy how much light a full moon can give off, even casting some quite punchy little speculars on things like cars and you get that same effect here. It's funny that such a technologically advanced show would use such an old-school technique but the artifice actually works better than ever in HDR.
Regarding compression I have to say that it looked a fraction untidy here and there, mostly in the noise around some of the brightest speculars but I didn't see anything encoding-related on the water as noted in post #615 at all. Now I ain't saying the water doesn't look weird in that dock scene because it does, it's as if the water to the right of Henry's little boat is perfectly in focus while the area to the left as Jack's yacht approaches looks really soft and out of focus but there's no 'blocking' in there that I can see. I checked the 1080p disc in the same place and the same effect is present, albeit less visible owing to the softer resolution and more blown-out visuals, but it
is there. So I can only think that it's some sort of VFX fudgery, like they combined different shots of the yacht and the smaller boat and either had to soften that patch of water in front of the yacht to blend the seams, or that the water was actually out of focus to begin with and they just merged the shots anyway.
The $64,000 question: did I have any playback problems? Nothing, nathan, nada. Played back in full-fat 4K60 DV 12-bit first time, no questions asked or raindances performed, and as such there were no blips, skips or dropouts. This was the US disc playing on a Panasonic 820 connected directly to a Sony 65ZD9 (using an HDMI cable that's closer to ten years old than not!):
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