There’s an ethical debate to be had around actors CGI’d post-mortem of which the transcript would run into the tens-of-thousands of words; a whole PhD dissertation’s worth of moral consideration. But even when the performers in question aren’t dead, per se, the effect is fundamentally weird, evocative of an unsettling uncanny valley. Just look at The Book of Boba Fett, which recently brought a younger version of Mark Hamill back to the screen using an array of impressive, albeit off-putting, digital wizardry.
It’s not the first time a Star Wars property has sought to include a younger version of the series' classic protagonist. In the final episode of The Mandalorian season two, Skywalker heroically rescued a besieged Mando (Pedro Pascal) and Grogu (“Baby Yoda”), his face concealed under a hood for most of the climactic saber-slashing sequence. It’s passable until his face is revealed, he starts talking… and it feels terribly off. The effect was the result of a Hamill/body double smoothie, with the older Luke actor blended with a younger lookalike using VFX.
It was received so poorly that Lucasfilm would go on to hire a YouTube deepfaker, who tweaked the footage from The Mandalorian from hokey cutscene into the realm of plausability, to re-do Luke for Boba Fett. This time, according to Esquire, Hamill was forgone completely. Performance artist Scott Lang played Skywalker on set, and deepfake tech was used to give him a Young Hamill mask in post. It still comes across as unnatural: while deepfakery might impress your dad when you use a novelty app to stick his face in his favourite film clip, it leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to professional VFX.
More unsettling? What you hear in the show isn’t technically Hamill. Skywalker’s voice is the product of an AI software, Respeecher, his lines synthesised by the program using a combination of existing recordings, from the old movies to audio books. Like the deepfake, it’s similarly lifeless, missing the intonations, tonal shifts, and subtle voice breaks that make us all human. That’s one thing an algorithm is yet to achieve: a plausable inconsistency.
Long-dead performers have already been digitally puppeteered countless times, from Peter Cushing in Star Wars: Rogue One to Audrey Hepburn in that Galaxy advert. (You remember: Mooooon river…) Similarly, CGI came to the rescue with Ghostbusters: Afterlife, rendering the ghost of original Ghostbuster Egon in the film’s climactic moments, Harold Ramis’ deceased, flickering eyes helpfully obscured by a neon blue sheen. Many fans were excited to see his return. Others saw a lifeless, silent commodity.
Aside from this all being artistically bankrupt, the product of an ever-whirling nostalgia machine that demands the easy sell of recognisability, it’s profoundly worrying for the future of entertainment. Again: not to get into the ethical debate around the commodification of likenesses, not least the visages of the deceased, but it’s ghoulish to think that such exhumations are becoming increasingly de rigueur. Mark Hamill can currently consent to the reproduction of his image. But what about when he can’t? If a Star Wars property ever reintroduces Han Solo, are we to expect digital Harrison Ford in lieu of Alden Ehrenreich?
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and there’s a reason why studios will go to such great lengths to achieve effects like deepfake Luke — because we have existing relationships with these characters. We love them so much that we’ll buy subscriptions to streaming platforms, or tickets to hologram concerts, to see them as we remember them one last time. But the longer we’re stuck in the past, seeking out shallow facsimiles of the joys from our youth, the less impetus filmmakers have to create novel works from which we can build new cultural memories. And that is painfully sad.
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