In Laman's Terms is a new weekly editorial column where Douglas Laman rambles on about certain topics or ideas that have been on his mind lately. Sometimes he's got serious subjects to discuss, other times he's just got some silly stuff to shoot the breeze about. Either way, you know he's gonna talk about something In Laman's Terms!
With this Friday's new action movie Gemini Man, director Ang Lee will be using cutting-edge computer-generated visual effects to create a wholly digital version of Young Will Smith. Put it another way, Lee is using CGI to "...[make] a person...from another person!" It's a groundbreaking concept that I'll be curious to see in terms of how it fares in actual execution. After all, Gemini Man is not the first movie to try and create digitally de-aged versions of our favorite movie stars, with a number of those tries going horribly awry. Before we all strap in for Aladdin Will Smith duking it out with Fresh Prince Will Smith, let's look back at the history of CGI wizardry trying to make young versions of famous movie stars.
Such a history actually begins with Gemini Man. No, this is not a strained attempt at a dumb joke, Gemini Man is a key example of early Hollywood attempts to use CGI to de-age famous movie stars. Gemini Man was originally set up as a project at Disney's Touchstone Pictures that would make use of Disney's now defunct visual effects company The Secret Lab. A number of famous movie stars were thought of for the lead role, including Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford and...Chris O'Donnell? What? Anywho, the project eventually died out (it was randomly revived in 2016 when Skydance bought the project from Disney) because the visual effects necessary such a project just weren't there yet.
Creating digital humans was a major hurdle for these early years in the world of computer-generated animation, early attempts at this in shorts like Tin Toy or the feature film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within creeped out viewers rather than enchanting them. Though such a struggle meant that version of Gemini Man may never have gotten off the ground, but that didn't mean Hollywood was about to stop tinkering away at the concept of using CGI to digitally de-age people. The first really noteworthy attempt at actually accomplishing this feat emerged in X-Men: The Last Stand, which featured digital younger versions of Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan. Though they look awfully plastic today, in 2006, the fact that this even existed at all was a major breakthrough for the world of visual effects.
Following up on these digitally de-aged mutants was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. This motion picture's whole premise, about a guy born as an old man who proceeds to age backwards, was seemingly tailor-made for digital effects used to de-age (and age up) famous actors. The results were widely acclaimed at the time and won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects. Watching the movie in 2019, though, these effects prove to be more of a distraction than anything else. Some older CGI effects, like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, seem to never age a day, but the CGI used to alter the ages of Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett is certainly not an example of those sort of VFX. A pivotal climactic scene involving an elderly Cate Blanchett looking at an elderly ten-year-old version of Brad Pitt is supposed to be poignant, but both characters just look like rejected characters from the Polar Express movie.
Admittedly, if the characters were extremely well-written, such distracting visual effects work could be forgiven, but compounded with the subpar writing of the feature, the VFX of Benjamin Button prove to be underwhelming and even genuinely irritating. Why couldn't they just get a child actor to play this version of Benjamin Button? A chance for the audience to connect with the characters on-screen is lost because Benjamin Button was more enamored with CGI trickery rather than good storytelling. It's a good example of how CGI is best used in live-action filmmaking for little stuff you literally can't do on a film-set, like removing all the cars in the background of a shot or to help puppets blink. It should be the icing on top of a sundae, not the whole dish as Benjamin Button used it.
Similarly underwhelming results were found in the next prominent usage of a digitally de-aged human, the villainous Clu in Tron: Legacy. The character is played by a digitally de-aged version of Jeff Bridges to serve as a physical manifestation of the worst traits of Kevin Flynn (also played by Bridges). I actually like the flawed but enjoyable Tron: Legacy overall, with much of that enjoyment coming from the features gorgeous visuals. Given what a scrumptious experience Tron is in terms of production design and CGI effects, it's shocking then that Clu looks so poorly, he's constantly taking you out of the movie whenever he's interacting with his entirely live-action co-stars or whenever emphasis is placed on his rigid face. There's an interesting idea at the heart of making the villain of Tron: Legacy a young version of an absent father, but the visual effects used to execute that idea left something to be desired.
The divisive response of Clu coincided with Hollywood taking a break from the process of digitally de-aging actors. Whether that hiatus was because of the mixed results of Tron: Legacy can't be determined, but Hollywood's visual effects community instead turned its attention instead to fine-tuning motion-capture animation used for human-esque creatures, like Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes or Hulk in The Avengers. Speaking of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they actually gave a jolt of life to the visual effects process of de-aging with Ant-Man, which brought out a digitally de-aged version of Michael Douglas for a prologue sequence. This version of Douglas is only briefly seen on-screen, but in its minimal screentime, it's mighty impressive looking and the best use of this technology yet.
Much of that can be chalked up to Ant-Man using this version of Douglas sparingly. Once again, it must be stated that CGI effects is a totally valid tool of artistic expression that's best used for live-action cinema in careful measures, as seen in the brief use of young Michael Douglas in Ant-Man. The success here inspired Marvel Studios to start using this technology on regular basis for short pieces of screentime in their movies. Young versions of Robert Downey Jr., Kurt Russell, Michelle Pfieffer and Laurence Fishburne appeared in their subsequent productions while Avengers: Endgame managed to concoct an even younger version of Michael Douglas for a quick cameo. All of these instances were brief in their screentime but they produced mostly successful results.
Marvel Studios hasn't really permanently solved the issue of digitally de-aging actors, especially since Hollywood has shown time and time that their ideal use of this format would be to use this technology for leading performances. None of the de-aged characters in the Marvel movies have anywhere near the screentime as the digital characters in Benjamin Button and Tron: Legacy, making it hard to tell if, say, Digital 1980's Michelle Pfieffer could sustain a whole movie. A poor attempt to make a fully-CGI version of the character Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One also served as a reminder that this technology, even in the modern era, is far from flawless. On the other hand, Logan's use of digital wizardry to make Hugh Jackman look ragged and old showed that Marvel Studios doesn't have a monopoly on executing CGI effects work related to aging up actors. Perhaps Gemini Man will be the next one to show off a breakthrough in this particular field CGI visual effects. Hopefully it also remembers, like the best Marvel Studios movies and Logan did, that snazzy visual effects work alone cannot carry a movie, they must be used in tandem with good characters and thoughtful storytelling.
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