I'm sure a lot has been written about how this represents a technological accomplishment, a necessary milestone on the road to completely believable digital actors. While I will not deny that before success there must inevitably be stumbles and often failure, I do deny that these failures need be presented to the audience. Every story starts with a first draft and first drafts are often messy, disjointed, unfit for viewing even by an editor let alone a general audience. They are a necessary part of the process, but as audience members we need not be subjected to them. The reasons for Tarkin's unconvincing appearance may be multifold and justified: perhaps he was a late addition and the VFX team had to scramble, perhaps the technology simply isn't there yet, etc. But I don't see how any self-respecting directing-producing team could allow his visage into the final cut. Are they all clinically blind? A single glance at his face in motion should be more than sufficient to convince even the most stalwart digital actor advocate that it simply isn't working and needs to be cut from the film.
I would also like to attack the idea that digital actors are a necessary technology that the medium should advance. To think that all technology will continue apace in all directions is simply a fallacy. Technological progress occurs in the directions where we as a collective afford attention. Convincing digital actors may seem inevitable, but they are not. Should they become a reality it will be due to the collective choices of those in the VFX and film industries. In the case of Tarkin, the technology is used to resurrect Peter Cushing, who played the character in the 1977 original Star Wars film and who passed away in 1994. The idea that a different actor can play the same character is nothing new, but the application of the technology in this way seems to deny an actor's authorship in storytelling. The actor who played Tarkin in Rogue One has his authorial contribution mitigated and subordinated to animators as happens in a digital performance or a puppeteer. But now the image of Peter Cushing's face is plastered atop this performance. It is as if to say that Peter Cushing - being so iconic in the role - is Tarkin, and yet it shows a startling lack of reverence by then trying to mimic that performance without Peter Cushing, which seems to say the opposite, that Peter Cushing is not Tarkin. Since Tarkin is simply a character, they should be open to a standard re-casting of the role. But to use Peter Cushing's appearance in this way without his performance seems to me incredibly disrespectful not only to the late actor, but also to acting in general. Suppose the effect was flawless and I was unable to tell it was not a real actor, this would simply serve as the tipping point for a dark future where actors of the past can live on in perpetuity, where the box office of the future is perhaps forever dominated by Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt while nameless actors do the heavy lifting under the digital makeup, struggling for recognition and respect. We could discuss how impressive the technology was, and how depressing the future would be.
Later in the film I was incredibly impressed by the appearance of Red Leader and Gold Leader. They seemed to match my memory of how they looked in the 1977 original almost exactly and I found myself asking: how did they do that? At first I thought they too perhaps were digital recreations, but the gulf between them and the comparatively animatronic Tarkin threw that idea out the window, it was beyond unreasonable to think that the VFX team could do such an outstanding job on these minor characters and then drop the ball so spectacularly on a main character. I then thought that they must be new actors, chosen for their likenesses and that my memory of how they looked was no doubt flawed and a side by side comparison would reveal that they were not the same actors. Afterwards I learned that they were the same actors, taken from archival footage of the original.
After viewing the film I tried to understand why the CGI Tarkin (and the final shot of the CGI Leia) bothered me so much. The movie was loaded with special effects, many of which were far from convincing. There were CGI ships and vehicles and buildings often in shots with compositing that made the falsity of the presentation a little bit uncomfortably obvious. Yet I did not find this to be distracting or damaging to my ability to "enjoy" (endure?) the film. Another main character, the droid K2-SO is an entirely digital creation. I don't know that there was a single scene where I truly believed K2-SO was really there or that he was made of real metal, and yet his appearance did not particularly bother me. In comparison the CGI Tarkin and Leia elicited an almost visceral reaction in me, a sort of revulsion that made me want to look away and forget what I had seen. I attribute this to the incredible facility of the human mind for recognizing human faces. We see faces all the time and it is perhaps the object with which we are most expert at identifying. We see and absorb every subtle tick, hair, and eye movement even though many of these details escape our conscious minds. We are trained through experience to detect falsity - a false smile, insincerity, and much of the same mechanisms used to do this must be at work when we look at a face that is not really human, not really alive. The CGI human faces are obvious because the standard of realism for human faces is perhaps the highest standard there is in the human mind. We afford maximum attention to human faces, we are expert at identifying them, we notice the subtlest of incongruities within them. However, while this explains why Tarkin and Leia were unconvincing to me, it does not explain my revulsion to them. K2-SO was similarly unconvincing although to a much lesser degree, as were many of the vehicles and buildings and landscapes. Perhaps because those things did not exist, I did not have a proper point of comparison for how they should look, and so was able to justify in my mind their 'not-quite-right' appearances. However I think it is perhaps more a matter of consistency. Suppose all the characters were digital at the same fidelity as Tarkin, while the effect would at first be jarring, after some adjustment I assume I would get used to it. Then when Tarkin appeared I don't see that it would have elicited such a reaction in me. Tarkin's irreality is made apparent by contrast to the other human actors. Other characters - aliens and robots - may be digital creations without causing too much of a similar disconnect owing largely I believe to the very specialized hardware we possess specifically for identifying human faces.
As a thought experiment, I imagined a movie that has both human and cartoon actors intermixed. The cartoon actors are very obvious and the overall effect is much like the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I try to imagine whether this effect bothers me in a similar way. Ultimately I think it comes down to how it is handled. If the cartoon characters are treated as interchangeable with the real characters, and no acknowledgement is made of the difference so that they are passed off as indistinguishable, then I believe this effect becomes quite bothersome. If, however, a reason is given in the film for the different appearances and the differences acknowledged then I think I would be OK with the effect such as in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I'm not sure I can articulate why one route is acceptable to me and not the other. Perhaps one carries with it the appearance of the filmmakers trying to slip a trick past me and insulting my intelligence (and visual acuity) in the process.
References
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. (2016) Directed by Gareth Edwards [Film]. Burbank, Calif.: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
Star Wars. (1977) Directed by George Lucas [Film]. Los Angeles, Calif.: 20th Century Fox.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit. (1988) Directed by Robert Zemeckis [Film]. Burbank, Calif.: Buena Vista Pictures.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit. (1988) Directed by Robert Zemeckis [Film]. Burbank, Calif.: Buena Vista Pictures.
