Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2016)
Directed by Ang Lee
19-year-old Billy Lynn is brought home for a victory tour after a harrowing Iraq battle. Through flashbacks the film shows what really happened to his squad – contrasting the realities of war with America's perceptions.
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What critics compared Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk to
Lee once again is using the high frame rate he deployed in “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” (which I liked more than most) but it’s even more distracting this time around.
Matching his 2016 effort on Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Ang Lee shot this film in full 4K HD for large scale 3D at a 120 fps clip, exponentially higher than the standard 24 fps rate.
Lee’s previous film, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk , harnessed the intense smoothness provided by this high frame rate to suggest the eerie sense of hyperreality experienced by its title character, an Iraq War veteran who has post-traumatic stress disorder.
Lee, a chameleonic director, has in recent years developed a habit of turning movies into tech demos, experimenting with elaborate visual effects simulacra in Life Of Pi and high-frame-rate, high-resolution digital 3D in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk .
Ang Lee’s recent obsession with digital cinema continues in Gemini Man, marking the second time for the internationally renowned Taiwanese director after the tepid Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk three years ago.
Ang Lee’s ardour for the high frame rate 3D presentation has not gone away despite the failure of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.
The success of recent films like American Sniper and Lone Survivor has paved the way for a new crop of war movies that isolate individual soldier stories, many of them true, and moviegoers are feasting on 'em.
With the exception of American Sniper, Clint Eastwood’s sturdy exercise in Fox News–era jingoism, movies about the Iraq war and the West’s involvement in Afghanistan have proved as popular with audiences as ice cream in a sandstorm.
To be sure, the combat sequence that Lee stages to finally reveal the details of the engagement in which Billy showed exceptional heroism can’t help packing a punch, but frankly it seems sanitized beside recent films like “American Sniper” and “Lone Survivor.”
Thematically speaking, it’s a tossed salad of Clint Eastwood’s Flags Of Our Fathers and Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper .
By stripping away all the usual cinematic stylings of a typical war picture (such as the up-close-and-personal grittiness in American Sniper), all that remains is a distracting theatrical-like staginess.
Avatar: The Way of Water employs high-frame-rate photography, previously used in the Hobbit movies, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk and Gemini Man.
Unlike Ang Lee’s very fine Iraq War drama, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which used 3-D to explore the depths of brotherhood and the war’s emotional complexities, Nolan’s movie flaunts empty violence.