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The Vanity of Digital De-Ageing
It isn’t the actors demanding they remain forever young…
Whether it’s Tom Hanks and Robin Wright being pictured from their teens to old age in Here, or Samuel L. Jackson being returned to his pre-fame features in Captain Marvel, Hollywood LOVES digital de-ageing. The Irishman, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, X-Men, Star Wars: Rogue One, Tron Legacy, Terminator Genisys, Captain America: Civil War, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and on and on, every major franchise has used or is continuing to use digital technology to ‘youthicise’ their main actors. That’s when they aren’t digitally reviving the dead ones. Paul Walker, Peter Cushing, Ian Holm, Carrie Fisher, Harold Ramis, Laurence Olivier, Christopher Reeve, Marlon Brando and soon-to-be-many-more actors have all been digitally resurrected in the last twenty years. Despite the fact the technology is — despite being impressive — largely unconvincing, studios continue to practice digital de-ageing. Why?
The concept of recycling characters, or bringing back characters whose performers are dead or too old, is not a new phenomena, but that method they used in the past is still practiced today. This is the practice of simply recasting the character. James Bond is currently standing at seven different actors who have portrayed him on screen over the last sixty years…
