Dead Alive
A few words about CGI Ian Holm
Cinema is the realm of ghosts. Faces trapped, unchanging, within the chemical makeup of celluloid (or the 1s and 0s of a digital file), existing long past death, haunting our present. You know, all that poetic shit. But it’s true. Which is why it’s offensive to venture out to the theatre for the newest entry in the Alien franchise and be confronted with Ian Holm.
Holm, who died in 2020, came to prominence first on the British stage, before finding acclaim on television and in film. His role as the Nostromo’s science officer and surprise android Ash in 1979’s Alien was his mainstream breakthrough. He went on to Chariots of Fire, Brazil, The Sweet Hereafter, The Lord of the Rings. An enviable career. And now, despite being dead, Holm is back. The “actor” appears as another science officer/android character, Rook, in Fede Álvarez’s new Alien: Romulus, a sequel to Alien, set before the events of Aliens. Presumably, the reason to have Holm return, despite playing a different character, is that in the Alien universe, androids are mass manufactured, so many will look the same. But I’ll remind you once again: Holm is dead. He’s not playing anything.
No, what we get in Alien: Romulus is a digital Ian Holm, existing deep in the uncanny valley, done up to looks exactly as he did in the 1979 original. And we’re not talking about some small CGI cameo, either. The fake Holm, as Rook, ends up being the film’s major non-Xenomorph antagonist. He’s a full-on character, and his reveal is a big surprise. Not to the other characters in the movie, mind you, because they haven’t seen the Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece. No, to them he’s just some android who’s been cut in half Dewey Cox-style. The surprise is for the audience, or at least those in the audience who’ve seen the first film and recognize Holm. Those people are meant to see the actor resurrected in digital form and grin, or point in amazement, or clap at the miracles of modern technology overcoming death itself. I wanted to throw up.
Alien: Romulus is a bankrupt work of art even ignoring the zombified Holm. Any blockbuster studio sequel is going to navigate a duty toward fan service in some way, but Álvarez’s film amounts to little more than retread, like an even more shameless Force Awakens, in which almost every aspect of it is something you’ve seen before in the previous films, only worse. This is supposed to be okay, though, because the movie knows you know you’ve seen it all before and leans in. It’s winking at you, you see. You get that nostalgic pang of recognition, and the studio laughs all the way to the bank. It’s a sick relationship, and reanimating the corpses of dead actors adds to the sickness.
We’ve had a bunch of these now, and the precedent goes back some ways. Setting aside the instances of actors dying during a film’s production (I’ll get to those), the practice was employed in the ‘00s in a few films. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow manipulated old footage of the long dead Laurence Olivier to use him as a villain. Perhaps not entirely offensive. In a similar vein, Marlon Brando was resurrected via old, unused footage from the older Superman movies for Superman Returns. Honestly, not that offensive. The real turning point was Rogue One, in which a CG Peter Cushing appears as Grand Moff Tarkin circa 1977. A ghastly act of filmmaking and visual effects wizardry, made even worse by the ugliness of the effect itself.
The Star Wars franchise did it again in The Rise of Skywalker, which instead of finding natural way to account for Carrie Fisher’s untimely death in between films, brought her back the life using CG for some of the worse scenes in the entire series. We’ve also had CG Christopher Reeve in The Flash, and CG Harold Ramis in Ghostbusters: Afterlife, and we will certainly get even more examples. Even Furiosa created a CG version of Richard Carter as the Bullet Farmer from Mad Max: Fury Road.
It is, simply, a disgusting trend. A violation of human impermanence, not for art, but for the sake of corporate profits driven by audiences increasingly trained to eat up the most wretched slop and feel satisfaction from nothing more than looking at the screen and going, “Hey, I get that reference!” What’s truly amazing, though, is that it’s not even a trend audiences seem to like. People have been shitting on CG Cushing and Fisher for years, now. CG Ramis was specifically cited to me by people as a reason not to bother with that new Ghostbusters thing (not that I was going to bother to begin with). Even among Alien fans happy with Romulus, all of them agree that CG Holm is the worst thing in it. So why do this? What are these studios getting out of it, and what are filmmakers getting in return for selling their souls this way?
There is one great exception here. It exists in that space I mentioned, of actors who died mid-production. Oliver Reed was a famous early case, having died during shooting on Gladiator, with one scene done using some early, barely convincing CGI in order to make the unplanned exit of his character work narratively. Hideous, but a bit of a shitty situation. A worse example is Nancy Marchand, who was brought back for one more scene in The Sopranos as Tony’s mom Livia. The impulse to do it was understandable, given all the unfinished business involving that character. Unfortunately, the scene didn’t end up helping with any of that, and the effect was terrible. One of the rare black spots in an incredible series. There are other examples, all of them a little complicated morally, if understandable and acceptable, though most are quite bad. Most, except for Paul Walker in Furious 7.
When Walker died, mid-way through production on the blockbuster sequel, people were in something of a state of shock. The handsome star of one of the biggest movie series on the planet, gone in an instant. Series themes about family and sticking together seemed to transfer onto Walker as a person, as a figure in the culture. Furious 7, even before it was finished, suddenly became a tribute to the actor. After some time taken to figure out a way to proceed, the filmmakers opted to complete Walker’s scenes using a combination of old footage, digital effects, and his brother as a stand-in. As a technical feat, the attempt is only a partial success. Scenes work, and Walker’s role was clearly reduced via the script so as not to lean on his character too heavily, but it doesn’t look or feel exactly right. Good enough, but still a little ghoulish.
It’s the film’s final scene that redeems its digital black magic. Vin Diesel, as Dom Toretto, heads out onto the road, leaving Walker’s Brian O’Connor to a simple family life. But as he takes that drive, Brian catches up with him. “Hey, thought you could leave without saying goodbye?” Dom looks over at his friend, alive and well. What we the audience see is a digital facsimile, a Paul Walker who just doesn’t look real, who can’t be touched because, in fact, he’s gone already. He is, metatextually, a ghost. There, in that discordance, emotion overwhelms and the dam breaks.
Ian Holm in Alien: Romulus provides no such catharsis. He is a ghost, but the knowledge of that means absolutely nothing. All that can be gleaned from it is the moral and spiritual degradation of our culture, in which nothing is sacred except the all holy Intellectual Property.