What Are You Tarkin About?
November 18th, 2018
Brenda was out of town for a week and a half very recently, which left me with not a whole lot to do. Having stopped trolling douchebags on Twitter, and my attempts to do so to douchebags on Facebook falling flat with the admins of a group or two caving in to their most racist members, I resorted to working on my nerd site and assorted television time to keep myself entertained.
One boob tube project I indulged in was a double header of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. I did this for three reasons. The first was, well, because Star Wars. The second was that I wanted to see how well the two flowed together, since one was an immediate prequel to the other. And the third was, naturally, because of Tarkin.
The first time I watched Rogue One, I found the computer-generated Grand Moff Wilhulf Tarkin to be in the uncanny valley territory. His face seemed too detailed, too wrought with discernible features the rest of the cast lacked - unless, they too were generated by computer. Like the awesome Mon Calamari admiral featured here and there (no, not Ackbar, a different one).
But I thought, why not see how he looked in both, to make a proper judgment? So I paid close attention to the appearance of Tarkin in the film made decades before he died, and the one made decades after. And, what I found was that Tarkin looks just as distressing in both. His face is full of horrifying detail in each film, which everyone else around him simply does not possess.
Maybe my vision isn't 20/10 any longer, but I have to say the Rogue One people simply captured what was already there. The visage of an incredibly creepy, haunting villain. Sure, you can still tell that CGI Tarkin was artificial, but only just. I don't think the technology to seamlessly, digitally recreate actors for live-action films is quite there yet, but it's close. Very, very close.
The solution to this would be to either finish that job, thus making all video ultimately unreliable, or to simply animate entire films with that level of character accuracy. Both would work, I s'pose.