SPOILERS AHEAD FOR “THE BOOK OF BOBA FETT”
The second of the Disney+ “Star Wars” series, “The Book of Boba Fett,” has seen a rather unexpected turnaround in sentiment.
The first four episodes of the show’s run have been praised for some elements, criticised for others, and mostly hit with critiques about its pacing and blandness.
Then, abruptly, the fifth and sixth episode of the season essentially sidelined the title character from his own show – turning those two episodes effectively into a mini-season of “The Mandalorian”.
The sixth episode, in particular, is being heavily discussed for its bringing back of “Return of the Jedi”-era looking Luke Skywalker following a brief appearance in “The Mandalorian” second season finale.
Both that “Mandalorian” scene and the film “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” utilised a combination of visual effects, stand-ins, original actors, reference material and AI-simulated voices to deliver characters from the original trilogy era that never quite escaped the uncanny valley look.
Luke’s appearance in “Boba Fett” however, while not entirely out of the uncanny valley, certainly seems to be very much on the upward slope and is by far the most convincing use of that style of effect in a feature or series to date.
Following the episode’s airing last week, Esquire has done a feature piece on the de-aged Jedi character and revealed that the new look was done without the use of actor Mark Hamill.
The previous Luke appearance on “Mandalorian” saw actor Max Lloyd-Jones recording the scene followed by Hamill himself doing so, then blending the results with some de-aging technology. In addition, an AI program called Respeecher used previously recorded audio of Hamill to create a synthetic Hamill voice to create all the dialogue the character spoke.
With “The Book of Boba Fett” however, Hamill was eliminated from the equation altogether – both his voice and appearance this time being digitally created. Stunt double Scott Lang and performance artist Graham Hamilton played Luke on-set, then Lucasfilm’s hire last year of deep fake artist Shamook came in to play and the result was a more convincing young Luke Skywalker. Respeecher was then used to create all the dialogue.
The result has scored vocal reactions from fandom. It has also started plenty of speculation about what other characters could be realised from past films and extended lore, and more intriguingly debate about what this tech means for the overall future of filmmaking.
Combined with the introduction of “The Clone Wars” character Cad Bane last week, all eyes are now on “The Book of Boba Fett” finale which will air in a few days as fans wonder how Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau will surprise us all again.
