.

As well as once more returning Giger’s famous Xenomorphs back to our cinema screens, last month’s Alien: Romulus also brought back the debate about whether it is okay to resurrect film stars who have passed away by computer generating their face and voice and layering them over another actor.

The ethical concerns about this first surfaced properly in 2014 when they brought Audrey Hepburn back to advertise a chocolate bar. You can see the issue here as a lot of people consider it a sell out when Hollywood celebrities start hawking different products (especially then when it was not nearly so common) so to do this without their consent and when they are no longer here to challenge the use of their likeness seems quite profoundly disrespectful. There was actually a less widely seen commercial a year earlier that had Bruce Lee selling whiskey which feels even worse as in life Lee was actually teetotal.

‘Audrey Hepburn’’s Galaxy ad

.

With this opinion established, it was then two years later that cinema really got involved. Star Wars prequel Rouge One recreated the iconic Death Star Commander Grand Moff Tarkin in the shape of one Peter Cushing and in doing so resurrected this debate with him. The difference here, and I would argue that there is a difference, is that it was done on this occasion to extend the role of a character he had originally created, rather than just to flog sweets and booze. Carrie Fisher’s young Princess Leia was brought back in the same way but in that case Fisher herself was still alive when they did it, even though she sadly died while it was still in theatres.

Tarkin appears again in Rogue One

.

In fact Carrie Fisher’s death and the way they dealt with it raises some interesting points in this respect because they purposely refused to use CGI to bring the older Leia’s story to a close in The Rise of Skywalker which she was making at the time. Instead they took unused footage she has already shot from the previous two movies, therefore utilising a performance she herself had given, and used digital techniques to fit the film around her rather than the other way round. This of course strengthens the argument that it isn’t right to create new footage of a dead actor, although it was similar circumstances, that of an actor passing away before they’d finished making a movie, that first had effects artists playing this game even before Hepburn or Lee’s unceremonious returns. It was actually the accidental death of Lee’s son Brandon, while making The Crow way back in 1993, that lead to them completing his performance with computer trickery for that film and again they did it with Oliver Reed in Gladiator in 2000. Of course this was necessary to finish those movies and perhaps for this reason no one really objected to it at the time, just as they didn’t with Paul Walker in 2015’s Fast & Furious 7 or Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 the same year. It is hard to argue that what they did with Cushing, and what they’ve now done with Ian Holm in Alien: Romulus, is exactly the same since these performances have been brought back in films they never signed up for and that are happening decades later, but isn’t it fundamentally the same idea?

Consider as well Harold Ramis’ character Egon Spengler being recreated for Ghostbusters: Afterlife. It is interesting that they didn’t use any computer techniques with the character’s appearance at the start of that movie, choosing instead to have someone else play him in silhouette. They did do it when he came back as a ghost at the end though where his spectral nature meant they could make him look just very slightly cartoony. In doing this they made it clear that this wasn’t actually Ramis at all, just an animated recreation of the character he once played. Does this compare to all the Marvel characters in the What If TV show that don’t have the actors that created them involved? Tony Stark features in some of these stories and he looks and sounds like Robert Downey Jr. but he’s drawn by artists and voiced by Mick Wingert. Marvel can do this because they own the character’s likeness even though that likeness is actually that of a real person. Is it really any different when the animation is so good that it becomes photorealistic?

ALL of the original Ghostbusters come back in Afterlife

.

So if Egon Spengler reappearing in a recent Ghostbusters film is okay because we absolutely know it’s not Harold Ramis, if it is, then is it any different with Cushing or Holm, or Laurence Olivier in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow or Marlon Brando in Superman Returns or Christopher Reeve in The Flash or even JFK in Forrest Gump? Certainly the standard of even the latest effects are such that it doesn’t look exactly like Ian Holm either (and going back to that Audrey Hepburn advert, it looked so little like her, or any human being, I’m surprised anyone took them to task).

I’m really being devil’s advocate now but is there something to discuss here in relation to anyone that’s ever played any real person in any film ever? In the past they’ve used make up and costumes to recreate people sometimes to really good effect – Malcolm McDowell looks a hell of a lot like Rupert Murdoch in Bombshell and Robert Carlisle’s recreation of John Lennon in Yesterday was spooky. Now that CGI and deep fake tech can do a lot more to match these likenesses shouldn’t they be allowed to?

I am sure people will argue about this forever, and of course I know it’s for good reason. Sometimes it is more gimmick that narrative necessity, perhaps like in Alien: Romulus, but when the story properly demands they do it which probably was the case with Rogue One, can it just serve as a homage to and celebration of the original actor rather than it being some unforgivable liberty?