Did the film literally make me sick, or return me to the illness I thought I’d left behind a few days before? If so, I can imagine a couple of reasons why.

First, “Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk” was shot in 3D at a frame rate of 120 per second (five times the normal rate) at 4K, with the aim of producing a picture that offers far greater clarity and detail than standard movie images. Sony Pictures, though, elected not to go the expense of outfitting theaters so it could be viewed in the way it was shot, so it will be seen as Ang Lee intended it in only a handful of theaters in the country. The version I saw was the “normal” version that will be released most places, which prompts a question: Would the “real” version have left me feeling less ill, more ill or about the same?

I would guess more, or about the same, to the extent that the feeling was owed to the movie’s unusual visuals. The experience left me recalling an event I attended back around the year 2000, where several industry experts explained the nature of digital projection, which was soon to be introduced to movie theaters. One noted that film has an innate graininess and lack of definition that digital shooting and projection can eliminate. But, he said, his team did an experiment where they filmed a driver’s-eye-view of a car careening down at a mountain road. Shown as a standard film image, it gave viewers the sense of an exciting rollercoaster ride. But with the graininess of film removed and a hyper-clear digital image put in its place, the same scene was so realistic that it made some moviegoers vomit.

Previously, the most noteworthy proponent of higher-frame-rate movie images has been the legendary cinematographer Douglas Trumbull, who shot “2001: A Space Odyssey.” But Kubrick’s sci-fi epic—with its slow-moving planets, spaceships and vast distances—is arguably one of the few examples of a film that benefits from hyper-real images. Used in a standard dramatic movie like “Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk,” the technique engulfs the viewer’s eye in a surfeit of razor-sharp detail that entail, quite literally, too much information. I don’t know how many people will share this sensation, but for me the effect was akin to a mild case of car sickness.

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