From the Desert Comes a Stranger

I’m slowly catching up on The Book of Bobalorian, and finally got to that episode. The first four episodes felt pretty inconsistent, and were a little hard to get engaged in, and I suspect a lot of this was due to Robert Rodriguez’s direction, which just doesn’t feel like it has ”fit” particularly well.

But the combo of the return of Mando, and Bryce Dallas Howard’s direction, in chapter 5 definitely righted the ship, and Dave Filoni’s chapter 6 dialled things up to eleven. Because of course it did. Whenever Filoni sits in the director’s chair, everything just feels better.

But I’m not here to discuss plot, or direction, or the future of Grogu. I want to talk digital replacement characters, specifically Luke Skywalker.

There were definitely some improvements in the de-ageing/face-replacement work on young Luke in comparison to his original surprise appearance in The Mandalorian, but it still doesn’t work for me.

One minute it’s totally acceptable, and then the next scene it feels like his face is a flat image and they’re just animating his mouth. The uncanny valley is too hard to look past.

And I think they are absolutely aware of the quirkiness that is going on because the majority of Luke’s dialogue scenes just happened to feature Luke either with his back to the camera, in the distance, or out of frame entirely. Overall the amount of screen time was definitely pushing the upper limits that can be ‘handled’ by a digital replacement – especially when they’re sharing that screen time with other actual humans which only further emphasises the oddity of their ‘digitalness’.

For reasons the industry has yet to fully solve, animating human faces is seemingly still very very very difficult, and almost always results in something that just feels off. Which in isolation is bizarre, because we know how insanely good most visual effects are these days.

Somewhat oddly I think Disney-stablemate, Marvel, has handled most of their de-ageing pretty well, and to a much higher quality than we’ve seen with Luke – for example younger Samuel L Jackson in Captain Marvel was really good. The closest equivalent to the uncanniness of Luke is probably young Tony Stark when he’s first demonstrating his BARF technology at MIT, but even in that case you can explain it away because it is meant to be ’fake’.

I thought Marvel and Lucasfilm would have access to the same effects studios, techniques, and process, so where – and why – is it falling down in its use within the Star Wars universe? Who knows?

What I do know is that it seems like they are very likely to keep bringing old characters back – I’d almost guarantee we’ll get some sort of surprise in Obi-Wan – so what is the alternative? Actual humans, obviously.

Star Wars fans have been wishing for Sebastian Stan to play young Luke for years, and with the right hair and makeup there is zero doubt he could pull it off. I know there is a lot of love and nostalgia around continuing to let Mark Hamill play the role (even if there is close to zero chance that anything we see on screen is actually him), but they need to just rip the band-aid off and cast Sebastian.

Anyway, the finale is up next and it has a lot to live up to.