BEYOND THE GRaVE
Technology is bringing back dead actors — and raising ethical questions
Had Tom Hanks taken leave of his senses? Some 15 years ago, he came up with this bizarre notion that Meryl Streep portray Abraham Lincoln on screen. Hanks figured that if Streep ever wanted to play the Great Emancipator, she had the chance, taking advantage of the same motion-capture technology that had transformed him into multiple characters in Polar Express.
Those musings now seem tame compared with Hollywood’s newest venture into cloud-cuckoo-land — a plan to raise James Dean from the dead and digitally star him in a new movie.
Recently, The Hollywood Reporter announced that the Dean estate had granted filmmaker Anton Ernst permission to proceed with the digital resurrection of the legendary actor, who was killed in a motor accident in 1955. Dean’s likeness will appear as second lead in Finding Jack, a film about an injured Vietnam soldier and a dog.
Critics of the proposal — and they’ve ignited the internet — view this as shameless gimmickry, another example of technology gone mad. One irate critic blasted it as “CGI zombification.” But there are those within the Hollywood Dream Factory who would contend that it expands the frontiers of artistic expression.
Back in 2004, Hanks was gung-ho over his work in director Robert Zemeckis’s Polar Express, a film dedicated to promoting the legitimacy of a process that would capture an actor’s physical performance digitally and then turn it over to technicians who would heighten and embellish that performance and fine-tune the actor’s physical appearance.
Although Polar Express would earn more than US$300 million, its application of motion-capture technology to actual human characters did not win universal acclaim. Hanks thought his various digitally assisted incarnations in the movie — from boy hero to the train conductor — looked really neat. But a lot us thought he looked creepy.
This is an industry that throws caution to the wind when confronted with a shiny new plaything, which motion capture continues to be.
Director Martin Scorsese has been enticed into its world with his new film, The Irishman. This is the movie most of us will never have the chance to see on the big screen — thanks to Netflix’s strategy of keeping it out of cinemas in order to establish the superiority of the Netflix way. The movie is a strong Oscar contender — Netflix allowed it to be shown briefly in a few movie houses in order to qualify — but could its prospects be dashed by Scorsese’s decision to de-age stars Robert De Niro and Al Pacino so they could portray their younger selves in some scenes?
Reviews for The Irishman have been mostly favourable — yet there has been unease among some critics over the way De Niro, 76, and Pacino, 79, look in the sequences where they’re digitally stripped of their true age.
They note that De Niro in his younger incarnations still moves like an old man and that the faces of De Niro and Pacino possess an unnatural sheen similar to animated characters in Pixar movies.
Discussing the technology, movie critic Stuart Heritage highlights De Niro’s “upsetting Polar Express eyes” while also taking a swipe at Samuel L. Jackson’s “weirdly exhausted-looking Nick Fury in Captain Marvel” and the fact that Michael Douglas looks like he’s melting in Avengers: Endgame.
But Heritage reserves his greatest wrath for the upcoming resurrection of Dean’s Finding Jack. “They’re taking the likeness of a long-dead actor and feeding it into a technology largely known for producing creepy, lifeless monstrosities,” he fumes.
Meanwhile, director Ernst defends the “casting” of Dean. “The family regards this as his fourth movie, a movie he never got to make,” he says reverently. (Dean appeared in only three films before his death — East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant.)
Heritage doesn’t buy this argument: “Realistically, the filmmakers would be better served by digging up Dean’s body, dressing it in an army uniform and jerking it about on wires.”