I finally got out to see Rogue One over the holiday break, dragged my brother-in-law along on the 26th because apparently going to the movies the day after Christmas is a family tradition now, and I've got Thoughts. Not really about the plot (fine, a little flat in the middle, great in the last twenty minutes). What I can't stop thinking about is Grand Moff Tarkin.
If you haven't seen it yet: Peter Cushing, who played Tarkin in the original 1977 Star Wars and died back in 1994, is in this movie. Not archive footage, not a lookalike wearing prosthetics. Industrial Light & Magic built him from scratch digitally, mapped onto an actor named Guy Henry who did the actual performance, and stitched the whole thing frame by frame into a modern blockbuster. He talks. He walks around a Death Star set. He's got maybe fifteen minutes of screen time and he's doing real acting, or at least real acted-at.
I want to be clear that technically this is an astonishing piece of work. The lighting matching alone had to be a nightmare, matching a fully rendered face to practical sets shot on location. But I sat there in the theater with a $9 bucket of popcorn I definitely didn't need and felt kind of ill about it, honestly, in a way I wasn't expecting going in.
Here's my actual complaint, and its not really about whether it "looks real" (mostly it does, there are a couple of shots where the mouth moves a beat off from the words and it drops straight into the uncanny valley, but mostly it holds up). My complaint is that nobody asked Peter Cushing. He can't consent to this. His estate licensed his likeness, sure, there was presumably a contract and a check, but the guy himself has been dead for twenty-two years and now he's got a new performance nobody asked him to give. That's a genuinely new thing for movies to be able to do and I don't think the industry, or audiences, have actually caught up to what it means yet.
And it's not some far-off speculative thing anymore, its already happened, in a movie that made something like $150 million in its opening weekend. Which means the calculation for every studio with a dead actor and a valuable franchise just changed. I'd bet real money we see this again within a couple years, and probably not always for a supporting villain role that the plot sort of requires. Somebody's going to do it for a lead eventually, or bring someone back who died mid-franchise, and the ethics conversation is going to happen in public and after the fact instead of before, which is how these things always seem to go with tech.
I keep comparing it in my head to the Tupac hologram from a few years back at Coachella, which everyone agreed was a cool trick and also slightly unsettling, and this is that but with about four more years of rendering technology behind it and none of the "obviously a projection, obviously not real" tell that made the hologram easy to dismiss as a novelty. Tarkin isn't translucent and floating. He's just there, in scenes with living actors, doing coverage like anyone else on set.
None of this is a knock on ILM, to be clear. If anything it's the opposite: they did the job too well, and now there's a harder question sitting under the cool demo reel. I don't have a tidy answer for it. I don't think there is one yet. Digital likeness rights are a mess of estate law, guild contracts, and whatever a studio's lawyers can get an heir to sign off on years before anyone's built the tech to actually use it, and I'd guess most of those old contracts never even anticipated something like this.
Anyway. Go see the movie, the space battle at the end is worth the ticket by itself, and Alan Tudyk's droid is the funniest thing in a Star Wars movie in a long while. Just don't be surprised if the Tarkin scenes sit weird with you for a day or two after. Mine did.