How to Get to the Bottom Of a Puzzling Phenomenon

I was going to write about the idea of creating a CGI Hitler and having Andy Serkis or someone play him through motion capture, but I have thought of something only tangentially related but much more pleasant to discuss.

Spoilers for the first season of Picard:

Okay. One complaint people always have about digitally de-aged actors or CGI representations of long-dead actors is that they never look quite real.

Most Star Trek fans love the character Data, played by Brent Spiner. As the years passed it became difficult, and eventually almost impossible, to use Data in any shows or movies because he is an android who doesn’t age, while Brent Spiner is a man who does age, and has aged. (As have we all. I throw NO SHADE at Brent Spiner.)

Data appeared in the first season of Picard, but they just used makeup and carefully chosen camera angles instead of digital de-aging.  The thing is, one of Data’s primary character traits is that he doesn’t look quite real. They spent hours applying gold paint and contact lenses to Brent Spiner to make him look less like a human being, then he used his training and skill as an actor to make his movements just artificial enough to be noticeably uncanny. Data was the PERFECT candidate for computer de-aging. Looking artificial would have played into his characterization, not taken away from it.

Furthermore, all of data’s appearances in Picard were either in visions Picard had or inside a computer simulation; situations that, themselves, aren’t supposed to look real. Specifically, the scenes in the computer in the finale could have been done quickly using a game engine and the lack of quality would have made perfect sense.

I know the way they went probably cost less money, but it feels like a terrible wasted opportunity.

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