Access to such tools will soon be devolved further. The people who are actually driving this form of immortality are the living, whether to cope with their own loss or negotiate problematic plot-holes. And though Cushing’s estate approved his use in Rogue One, I’m not convinced that if I had built up a formidable acting career, I’d then want to turn in a performance I had bupkis to do with. Yet the reduction of the soul to regurgitated digital correspondence does not seem to me something a lot of people would like. Not just movie stars: new site repurposes your emails and text messages so that grieving relatives can converse with a chatbot doing an algorithmically generated impression of you. Perhaps we’re witnessing the first setback for that nascent industry that aims to keep us going digitally long after we’ve snuffed it. ( Sample tweet: “Mmm, girl, you must be CGI Peter Cushing because you can’t make eye contact and you’re confusing my children.”) And, much as this backlash is harsh on the techies, it’s also encouraging. Yet public reaction to the Cushing comeback has been more sceptical than I anticipated. And, especially, the notorious 2000 episode of The Sopranos in which the late Nancy Marchand’s head, speaking fairly random lines from outtakes, was wobblily lodged on someone else’s body. Grand Moff’s dialogue doesn’t seem entirely synchronised, and that’s an alarmingly waxy pallor – but it’s a huge leap forward from the shoot-him-from-the-back technique employed in 2014’s Fast & Furious 7, when the late Paul Walker’s brothers acted as stand-ins. For the rest of him, they wheeled on a Holby City actor with similar cheekbones then digitally stuck old bits of face on top.ĭoes it work? Remarkably well. The resulting lack of footage of Cushing from the knees down was apparently the biggest stumbling block for this year’s CGI resurrectors. Shooting the first movie back in 1977, Cushing had objected to his ill-fitting galactic imperial officer riding boots, so George Lucas let him slum about in moccasins. Such an appearance had been reported for more than a year, but it was still a morbid thrill to see how they’d pulled it off, particularly given the “slipper” issue. I had a similar sensation last week, when Peter Cushing (who died in 1994) popped up in the new Star Wars movie, Rogue One.
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