Watch ’90s Will Smith Take On 2019 Will Smith In The First Trailer For ‘Gemini Man’

For a while there in the ’90s, Will Smith was unstoppable.

The ineffably charming actor moved from box office success to box office success, becoming one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars in the process. He didn’t curse, he smiled a lot, and he lit up the screen.

Then, around the 2010s, Smith didn’t stop as much as he slowed a little. His films were no longer surefire hits — After Earth, a vanity project starring his son, Jaden, and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, was a commercial failure, and is generally regarded as one of the worst films ever made.

Essentially then, there are two Will Smiths — the handsome, young, bright Will Smith of the past, and the slightly greyer, slightly hollowed Will Smith of the present.

Very metatextually, Gemini Man, a new film from Ang Lee, sets these two Will Smiths against each other in a good old-fashioned punching battle.

Yep, that’s a digitally de-aged Smith coming head-to-head with regular old Smith, the two of them duking itout for reasons that the trailer gives absolutely no insight into. Indeed, the whole film has been strangely shrouded in mystery — not much is known about it other than the huge technical breakthroughs required to convincingly make Smith look young again.

Lee has tried this trick before with disastrous consequences — his last high frame rate film, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk was a commercial and critical flop. Even when Peter Jackson tried it for the Hobbit films it didn’t exactly go over well, with punters saying that the frame rate made them feel physically ill.

We’ll see how it works out when Gemini Man opens in Australian cinemas on October 10.