30 | New Scientist | 2 November 2019
Views Culture
“YOU made a person!” cries
Will Smith, tearful, stressed and
25 years younger than he ought to
be. “Out of another person! And
then you sent me to kill him!”
In Ang Lee’s Gemini Man, he
is facing off against his adoptive
dad Clay Verris (Clive Owen),
who makes perfect soldiers
for a living – or tries to. Smith’s
“Junior” is his latest wheeze.
Why Junior must kill his
“clone-father” 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’t going to get them – 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 mereclone? 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.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 “perfect
soldiers” flexible enough to do
the job that you want them to do,
you will have given them enoughClones are not us A movie that sends a young Will Smith to kill a version of his
older self sounds like it ought to be entertaining. Sadly, there are two big holes
in its logic – and the film hurls itself into both of them, says Simon Ings“ Who would be afraid
of a mere clone? We
deal with more serious
incursions of the
uncanny every day”Film
Gemini Man
Directed by Ang LeeSimon
recommends...Films
The Double
Directed by Richard Ayoade
The Double stars Jesse
Eisenberg in an excellent
reimagining of Fyodor
Dostoevsky’s disturbing
novella of 1846.Moon
Directed by Duncan Jones
A deliciously paranoid first
feature, with Sam Rockwell
facing off against Sam
Rockwell on the moon.agency to disobey you. This bind
has driven the plot of much good
robot-infused literature, from the
synthetic human’s birth in Karel
Čapek’s 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 “First to Serve”, in
which a government engineering
team is driven round the bend in
the effort to create an obedient
military robot. “Haven’t you
got it through your head?” a
researcher cries in exasperation.
“Pimmy’s the perfect soldier –
all of him, with all his abilities.
That includes individuality,
curiosity, judgment – and
intelligence. Cut one part of that,
and he’s no good. You’ve got to
take the whole cake, or none at
all. One way you starve – and
the other way you choke.”
A word about Gemini Man’s
de-ageing technology, which
supposedly took 20 years of
development before it could
make halving someone’s age
entertaining.
First, it didn’t. David Fincher
used it to make The Curious Case
of Benjamin Button in 2008.
Second, it needs a script to make
it work. Martin Scorsese’s recent
film The Irishman is so involving,
you never notice that the young
Robert De Niro’s 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. ❚PARAMOUNT PICTURES/SUPPLIED BY LMKA good movie needs
more than Will Smith
de-ageing on screenThe film column
Simon Ings is a novelist and
science writer and a culture
editor at New Scientist.
Follow him on Instagram
@simon_ings