Digital de-aging in movies is weird, no question about it, but it’s not going away, and none of the ethical or aesthetic concerns people may have about it will alter that fact. The technology is still at an experimental stage and is prohibitively expensive for most movies, but give it time: improvements will be made and the cost, inevitably, will come down. The big test will be Scorsese’s The Irishman, due for release later this year, in which we’ll see younger versions of Pacino and De Niro portrayed in extended sequences. Up to now, digital de-aging has had a fairground-attraction feel to it. Recent turns by Robert Downey Jr, Michael Douglas, and Kurt Russell in MCU movies have been “astounding” to see, but have also been kind of distracting, taking us out of the narrative flow as we check our uncanny-valley meters. Samuel L Jackson’s de-aged Nick Fury in the new Captain Marvel is a step forward, in that Fury is a major character in the movie and he has a lot of scenes in it. Captain Marvel is a superhero flick, though, with a comic-book aesthetic, and maybe that provides a degree of cover (don’t @ me). But young Pacino and De Niro? Portraying real people in complex dramatic situations? That’s either going to work or it isn’t. So I guess we’ll have to wait and see. But if it does work, there’ll be no turning back.
Traditionally, if you needed to portray a younger version of a character – for a flashback, say, or a sequence dealing with childhood – you hired a different, younger actor, someone who could plausibly carry the thing off. It was a convention. There might be some form of on-screen transition to mark the shift, a dissolve or a cross-fade, but we knew what was happening, and most of the time we accepted it without question. Think Anthony Wager as young Pip in Great Expectations (1946) becoming John Mills. Or when we leave Christopher Serrone as young Henry Hill in Goodfellas (1990) and pan up to meet Ray Liotta in his alligator-skin loafers and grey silk suit at Idlewild Airport. It’s cool, right? But transitions from young adulthood to middle-age or even old age can be a bit more problematic. Think Paul Bettany and Malcolm McDowell in Gangster No 1 (2000). Or Kate Winslet and Judi Dench in Iris (2001). Or Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney in Big Fish (2003). Or even the trifecta of greats playing Briony Tallis in Atonement (2007), Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai, and Vanessa Redgrave. Again, it’s a convention, and we live with it, but there’s an undeniable disruption for the viewer when these transitions happen. For me, the worst example of this is John Madden’s The Debt (2010), which tells the story of three characters in two time frames set thirty years apart. Jessica Chastain becomes Helen Mirren, Martin Csokas becomes Tom Wilkinson, and Sam Worthington becomes Ciaran Hinds. I liked the film a lot, but I got confused when it came to telling the two (four) men apart. If you pay attention, it’s clear – but it takes a bit of work, and it sort of broke the film’s spell as far as I was concerned. Could digital de-aging (or its opposite, acceler-aging?) transform a narratively ambitious film like The Debt? Possibly. But what’s certain is that when the technology becomes standard in a few years’ time, people’s expectations will change and they’ll more than likely view how older films such as Atonement and The Debt handled the issue as either quaint or absurd.
Related to this, of course, is the wider question of using CGI, or “human animation”, to give dead actors new life on the screen. Neither Audrey Hepburn, in that Dove commercial, or Peter Cushing, in Rogue One (2016), is too well served by the technology. Obviously, it’s a much more complex process than simply adjusting a living actor’s appearance, but if it can be developed to a high standard does anyone really doubt that it will be? I suppose another, more pertinent question is this: with today’s truncated cultural memory, what person born in the twenty-first century would have any curiosity about going to see a movie “starring” Humphrey Bogart or Greta Garbo?