As I was procrastinating today, dealing with something I caught over the weekend, I came across this video. It's a 30 minute essay about where to draw the line when it comes to depicting deceased people in movies using CGI.
You should really give it a watch! But to make my argument I'll give you the gist of it. The author proposes a scoring system for posthumous appearances involving visual effects and computer graphics. On the lowest end you have cases where such appearances can be justified, or at least allowed. On the highest end are examples that are despicable and outrageous and should've never been done.
Somewhere in the middle of the range is the case of Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One. For this role, Peter Cushing was recreated using a completely digital model with a stand-in actor sharing similar facial features performing on the set. The author of the video makes a damning argument that the decision to use a digital likeness of Peter Cushing is an insult to the art of acting, that it diminishes the actor's skills and performance to just their looks. Because apparently for Disney the consistency of the looks was so important, they couldn't just let the new guy take on the role without these digital prosthetics.
I definitely do not sympathize with the corporation exploiting a long dead person's image for their gain. It's absolutely fair to recast a role in this case, especially when films are so far apart in the making (original Star Wars and Rogue One, that is). But it made me think. Let me just talk aloud a bit.
We've had human actors for a few millennia, for as long as theater has existed. Recently (basically yesterday, in comparison), we began to see humanoid computer generated characters in live action. This has been a thing for the last 20 years or so, starting with Gollum. Then we had Caesar and other apes from the Planet of the Apes series. Then we had Thanos. And many others, but these are performances that are notable and to a serious degree life-like. The actors behind these roles are praised and elevated for their craft, even though their performance is only a part of the final result. The other part is on CGI artists.
But these are creatures, even if humanoid. We accept them, but only because we know they are not real, no matter how photorealistic they look and behave. Cases like Tarkin, however, are exactly on the fringe between real actors and acted-to-animated characters. This is something that is hard to accept. A role that was previously acted now being animated. A face that was previously alive now being generated. It's weird, and indeed creepy. But we do live in times where hyper-realistic animation is seamlessly blended with live action. The concept of an animated character is very blurry, how much of the original performance is translated, and how much is left to the digital artist to imagine?
These things will get better and better. If it's not seamless now, it will be in a few years. Hell, with deep fake this gets even more confusing, where the image generated is not exhibiting the computer graphics artifacts, because it is interpolation of real photos of a real person. But in either case, the role is still acted by someone. Whether the output is Thanos or Tarkin, there is an actor behind it. The face is only used for continuity (and brand recognition?). The estate of the actor typically agrees to the deal too.
It doesn't scream diminishing and disrespectful to me. Well, if the actual actor on set gets credited. But we know and celebrate Josh Brolin and Andy Serkis, but who played Tarkin or young Luke is Mandalorian is not so well known. That's the line for me, I think. If it's an animated role the real actor must be acknowledged, whether the animated character is purely made-up or is based on a real person. There is still acting craft involved here, it's just not recognized. And yes, it will remain weird to see a dead actor in a certain role being reanimated like that. At least for now.
But at some point, all of us become history. Would it be weird if we saw a live-action movie about Napoleon or Cleopatra where the main character was digital and animated? Like, think Alita: Battle Angel, but the character is not made-up. Those are some long dead people, but also so long dead, we probably wouldn't care at all?
I feel like my point at this point may come across as "We'll get used to it", it being corporate abuse of our very humanity. That's not it, but we probably will. All I'm trying to say is that there is a lot of something new and uncomfortable going on with the technology right now. Some of it is probably going to make us rethink our appreciation of certain things after some time. For better or worse.
PS. Are we in cyberpunk already?