Uncanny

Writing at The New Atlantis, Alexi Sargeant goes into great detail about why the recent use of CGI to recreate actors who died is not just creepy, it's more steps than you want in the direction of movies that have nothing to them and wind up not mattering.

Sargeant focuses on the recreated Peter Cushing we saw in Rogue One, filmed and released more than 20 years after Cushing died and 40 years after he played the role in question, the Grand Moff Tarkin. His take is a little different than many, which complain about the "uncanny valley" that exists when we look at faces which are supposed to be real people but which are whipped-up collections of pixels. Even the most perfect give many people a mild case of the creeps. The complaint says that the technology is still limited and these kinds of recreations should wait until that valley can be bridged.

Sargeant, on the other hand, says that better recreations might eventually close the gap but that will actually make things worse. We'll have a Peter Cushing indistinguishable from the actual one, for example, who can be superimposed over a stand-in actor for blocking and reaction purposes. Except we won't. We will have a digital recreation of the way the actor looked in one particular role (pretty darn scary) that will only do what the director wants. Sure, actors are supposed to read the dialogue written for them, even when George Lucas writes it. It's what they get paid for. But they bring some of their own vision for a character to the performance, and they speak with their own intonations or inflections. Does a line need to carry sarcasm? Compassion? Anger? Do those emotions need to be visible on the surface or masked? Historically, those questions are answered collaboratively, with ideas ad suggestions from directors, other cast members and even -- saints and angels preserve us -- the writer.

There could still be collaboration in determining how a CGI actor delivers lines and responds to other characters onscreen, of course. But one voice won't be heard, and that's the voice that belongs to the face we're watching. Valley-spanning improvements that lead to more "resurrections" like this will wind up disenfranchising the very person whose skill and sensibility made the role important in the first place.