Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

Ang Lee goes High Frame Rate to deliver UHD Blu-ray at 60 frames per second. And we LOVE it.

It’s 2:36am as I write this sentence, having just finished watching ‘Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk’. My review is due later today, but I’d put off watching it. I had watched a few scenes so I knew it was a technical masterpiece, but I’d been put off watching the whole thing as a movie.

Six point three. I’ve long held that if you’re playing the odds on picking a movie to watch, the score of the general people, as encapsulated in the ‘User Rating’ on the Internet Movie Database, is a better bet than relying on any particular critic, including me. But in this case, either the general people, or perhaps it’s me, are mad. They’ve given it 6.3 on IMDB. I’ve just gone there and given it 10, joining it with 66 other movies I’ve scored 10 out of the 2300-odd I’ve ticked on the site. It was that 6.3 that made me hold off watching, thinking it would be a chore.

I accept that for many, perhaps most, it won’t be quite their cup of tea. I’m going to recommend in a moment to every reader of this review that they rush out and buy a copy anyway, even if they absolutely hate it (as 3.4% of voting viewers apparently did, giving it a score of 1). It is rewarding in ways other than as a movie.

And as a movie? It’s about a soldier with a choice. People care for him in their different ways. One wants him to go one way, for his good, out of their love for him. Some want him to go another way, equally out of their love for him. All this is played out over a single day.

Someone once remarked that medals come not from acts of bravery, but from acts of bravery which are witnessed. Billy Lynn lives out a day in the glitzy surrounds of an ‘Merican! football game, while people around him are doing deals, perhaps to make a movie exploiting his heroic exploit. He takes comfort in the discipline and comradeship of his unit, while his mind slips back to that day, and other days, that inform the decision he has to make. It’s Iraq. It’s 2004. His friend, Vin Diesel is shot, likely to be dragged away to be hung from a bridge as some sick propaganda coup by insurgents. Young Lynn, only 19 and played by 19-looking 25-year-old Joe Alwyn, does something about it. A reporter’s video camera abandoned at the scene captures some of that something, and Lynn’s a hero.

So much of this movie rang true for me, even if a little idealised. I understand that the novel upon which the movie is based was a satire on the war, but somehow that got lost in the movie. Instead, it’s an intense, reflective drama on decisions and values.

But who cares what I think about the movie? How about this presentation of it?

What we have here is something very special. It’s Ultra High Definition, and it’s HFR. High Frame Rate, that is, 60 frames per second, some two and a half times faster than the rate at which we’re used to seeing movies.

Let’s not underestimate this change. Movies have been running at 24 frames per second since around 1930, when the introduction of ‘talkies’ forced standardisation. That’s nearly 90 years of one standard. It’s embedded into how we watch movies.

A couple of years ago I wrote of my ambivalence at seeing Peter Jackson’s ‘The Hobbit’ at 48fps HFR in the cinema. With this movie I’m not in the slightest ambivalent. The combination of Ultra HD and HFR creates a kind of hyper reality. There wasn’t just one thing, but 50 of them. A scene would change and again I’d be amazed at how very different this looked to anything ever presented in the home, or on the screen. A small convoy of Hummers rounding a corner. A scarred sister (Kristen Stewart, proving once again that one shouldn’t judge an actor by just one role, even one spread out over four movies). Lynn himself. There’s a moment in the movie when a bunch of largely unattractive members of the public thank Lynn for his service and each is presented to the viewer with a face occupying a large proportion of the screen. The detail realised by UHD, and what I’ll call the temporal details realised by HFR, turn these screen characters, each appearing for two or three seconds, into real people.

I suspect that this sequence was supposed to diminish those worshipping the hero, to make fun of them. But instead, the clarity and the transparency of 2160p/60 turned them into those real people. And real people are harder to view with contemptuous amusement than caricatures.

I so hope that 60p doesn’t just stick around but takes over the movie industry. If and as it does, though, filmmakers will have to learn a new language to use it to deliver the messages they intend.

A couple of final technical notes: in addition to this being the first 2160p/60 Ultra HD Blu-ray movie release, it may well be the first triple-layer disc. Certainly the box labels the disc as UHD-99. Also, both the UHD and regular discs have Sony test patterns, accessible from the main menu by keying in 7669 on your remote. Should you buy it? Absolutely. You read

Sound+Image so you want the best picture and sound. This is truly state of the art. This is the best demonstration of UHD quality available. Buy it.