It took me a while to catch up with the last three episodes of the Boba Fett TV show because there wasn't enough space cowboy in them, but I got there in the end, and can now officially say that the way they're handling Luke Skywalker is creepy as hell.
I just can't look at it too closely - the weird hybrid of the mighty Mark Hamill, a faceless stand-in and a shitload of de-aging tech creates a soul-less abomination of a thing that has the surface reflection of the character and none of the depth.
And anytime they age out the lines and wrinkles, they're also aging out the infinite subtleties of the human performance. They're creating a character by committee, just by the very nature of the work, unable to provide the unique spontaneity of a truly great actor like, say, Peter Cushing.
It's been a few years but I still feel personally affronted by the use of Cushing in Rogue One, no matter what clearance they go to do it. They took an actor capable of an incredibly deep performance - finding nobility in the most wicked, or just new depths of depravity behind his thin smile - and turned him into a very highly rendered cartoon.
(Doing it to the late, great Carrie Fisher as well, right in the last shot, was the just extra icing on the shit cake.)
We all know these things aren't real and that there is nothing wrong with recasting a part - nobody bats an eyelid when Sherlock Holmes is played by 13,000 guys named Basil. Whatever the issues the Star Wars crew ran into with the under-performance of the Solo movie, the new actors were not the ones to blame.
People who sound very confident about it are always talking up the idea of bringing back dead actors to play new, post-mortem roles, but this should not be allowed to happen. It's not even just a matter of respect, a thousand visual artists can't capture the natural art of a single eyebrow on Cushing's amazing forehead.
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