There’s no denying that Ang Lee is one of the finest filmmakers of the modern age, and one who always seeks to push the boundaries of what cinema can achieve. Unfortunately, Billy Lynn’s Halftime Walk proved to be one of his less successful efforts in that respect, which is putting it lightly.
The Academy Award-winning director may have brought wuxia to the mainstream with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, delivered a classic in Brokeback Mountain, and mastered cutting-edge CGI with Life of Pi, but the literary adaptation fell into his camp of noble failed experiments alongside Hulk and Gemini Man.
Billy Lynn’s Halftime Walk was the first-ever feature film to be shot at 120 frames per second in native 3D at a resolution of 4KHD, and people absolutely hated it. The most common complaint was that the pioneering technology was as distracting as it was innovative, causing headaches and making it look like more of an eyesore than the genuine revolutionary it was touted to be.
As a result, the film was greeted with a shrug by critics and ignored by audiences after failing to recoup its $40 million budget from theaters, and there are several very good and entirely valid reasons why the 120 FPS experiment was halted across Hollywood shortly after.
Then again, Billy Lynn’s Halftime Walk has made a streaming comeback in a much more palatable resolution after FlixPatrol revealed it to have infiltrated the iTunes global charts, so there’s hope yet that the high-profile failure could yet be given the reappraisal it didn’t deserve the first time out.