The Morality of Resurrecting Actors: A Star Wars Story
Billed as a “standalone spinoff,” Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, is in my opinion the greatest spin-off story no one asked for. It is a story about a team of rogue insurgents, led by Felicity Jones’s Jyn Erso, who are tasked with stealing the plans of the evil Empire’s Death Star preceding the events of the well-known first installment in the Star Wars saga, A New Hope. Some didn’t think it possible that this story would succeed or provide anything new, but at the end of the day, box offices, critics and fans alike showered the film with praise for its ground-breaking visual effects and animation in order to bend cinema’s reality in new ways never imagined possible. The work of Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), founded back in 1975 by George Lucas, is responsible for making all of Rogue One come to life but despite the many successes of this film, not everyone had praise for the techniques used in bringing back some rather iconic figures.
In the world of visual effects, aliens and spaceships are relatively easy to create. Despite the incredible space battles above bizarre, oasis planets or in the depths of ancient Jedi tombs, the thing that Rogue One may be most remembered for the most is the achievement of recreating two characters from the past. I was wowed by how ILM successfully recreated the likes of a 19 year-old version of the late Carrie Fischer and the late Peter Cushing from A New Hope. When I first saw the semi-visible reflection of Cushing in a glass window pane aboard a Star Destroyer, I was floored, but then, when he turned around my eyes swelled with tears at the shear awe of what I saw before me. It looked just like Cushing, he sounded just like Cushing, and he moved like him, too. I wondered how they did it. I found out that this monumental and cinematic task fell to John Knoll, Chief Creative Officer of Industrial Light and Magic and co-creator of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story to recreate the two just as they looked in 1977.
Unfortunately, though, not everyone saw it quite as an achievement but rather as uncanny on the brink of a poor immoral decision. To “bring back an actor from the dead” has never been achieved at this scale before. Normally, in movies we see CGI create characters that are from “out of this world.” We have seen this with characters in recent movies like Thanos from Avengers: Infinity War to the Navi natives in the “godfather film” of motion capture, Avatar. They do this by using motion capture technology to analyze how an actor moves and then mask over the actor with a digital recreation of the character they are trying to show on screen. In these cases, the characters that are created using motion capture typically are made into aliens, however, changing the appearance of humans to either make them appear younger or injured like in Tron or The Dark Knight, has been achieved as well. Advertisements for products have tried to use deceased celebrities for a split second or two in order to promote their product. Take the Dirt Devil or Galaxy Chocolate, who tried to recreate Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn, respectively. It was attempted in a later The Fast and the Furious movie, too, as to complete some of the scenes of the suddenly late Paul Walker. However, never at this magnitude, have digital animators tried to recreate the exact image of a deceased actor for so much screen time in many vital scenes.
Despite its software success at a technological level, often you will find comments on social media sites, YouTube comment pages and other places where people have voiced their concerns and disgust over the recreations. It’s the eerie digital image of Cushing’s Tarkin that no one can quite seem to agree what the problem is. Some say it’s not quite human, others think it is too human — just that they know Peter Cushing has been dead for quite a while.
It’s just that people look at human faces a lot. Not in a perverted way, just that people do. We as humans know what other human faces look like. Thus, it is fair to assume that people are very attuned to noticing when things look just a little off. This makes the job of a digital animator difficult. In an interview between Digital Character Model Supervisor Paul Giacoppo from ILM and Wired Magazine, Giacoppo explained how creating believable digitized humans is one of the hardest things to do with animation.
In order to recreate Peter Cushing’s Grand Moff Tarkin, the first step for ILM’s artists were to binge watch all of Cushing’s scenes in A New Hope. They had to see how Cushing acted, how he moved, how he smiled, etc. Then, they had to find an actor who could play the part of Tarkin “underneath” the mask. Guy Henry carefully studied Cushing’s little quirks down to the voice and movements on the set. While Henry “mimes” and voices the actor, the face, however, is Cushing’s. The way they do this is by first shooting the live action film of Henry dressed in full costume. Then, on his head he has a head-mounted camera rig with four tiny cameras all strapped to film his facial performance. Then, by syncing the motion capture performance recorded by the camera rig, they link with a 3D model of Henry and then of Cushing, to make it appear Henry’s performance is actually Cushing’s.
To quote Malcolm from Jurassic Park, “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Actually, Disney and ILM did, and in both cases, ILM and Disney sought permission from Carrie Fischer before she passed and Peter Cushing’s estate before attempting to recreate these two people on the silver screen. Some may say that approval from estates may not matter — that the dead or even the living who no longer are working with the project are to be kept out of the final pieces.
It seems to me that despite the success of the film and the technological feats that ILM has accomplished, the ethics of the reanimation of two fallen actors get in the way of good storytelling. But who is right? Will we ever agree? I do not know. I think that the designers don’t get the credit they deserve for fully digitally reanimating an actor’s image. They have manipulated the software in front of them in such a way that the reality of the cinema has made us ask, “Is that the Peter Cushing?” How amazing is that? Yet people question the ethics of recreating a person’s image whether living or dead. And while I understand this, I think that at the end of the day what needs to be celebrated is human innovation. Life is a beautiful thing, but what is life if we do not dabble with things we have not yet perfected. The recreation of Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher is not to distort them or mock their image but to honor their roles as actors and the characters that they made great. I imagine that the roles their characters play in the next chapter in the Star Wars saga fit in exactly the way the actors themselves would have wanted them to be played. I see no sign of disrespect when watching this film and certainly no disrespect in the recreation of two iconic characters.
