Celluloid is Immortality

Once I had calmed down from all the excitement and euphoria I experienced while watching the new Star Wars film ‘Rogue One’, I was left to finally reflect on what I had just witnessed and how I actually felt about certain aspects of the film. For all the films triumphs I was left feeling cold, that on some level there was something indistinctly wrong with it.

The most significant and controversial factor of the film is the reconstruction of Peter Cushing’s character Grand Moff Tarkin from the original Star Wars film. The CGI special effects that restore Cushing’s image to such a realistic and authentic likeness are jaw dropping and it demonstrates just how far we have come in the last ten years with regards to special effects and movie making across the board. Once you process what you are seeing, that this is in fact an entirely CG character, which takes a while to recognise as it is that life like, it is then that you can overcome your initial excitement and fanboy giddiness and begin to contemplate if this is in fact in good taste or poor taste, whether it is ethical, legal or even humane.

After some considerable time of mulling this over I must say that there is something about this entire thing which just feels wrong. Because the sequences which include such innovative and dazzling special effects are the most thrilling and exciting moments of ‘Rogue One’, they have come to taint the film for me as it does not feel like cinema anymore. This obsession with nostalgia and digging up the past to the point of literally resurrecting the dead to give posthumous performances (without any consent or blessing) just feels icky and in incredibly poor taste. No matter how much love and affection motivated the filmmakers to reconstruct Peter Cushing in his iconic role, it is unnecessary, inhuman and it isn’t filmmaking. This is no longer cinema. What we are experiencing as we progress further into the post digital age is something that can only be defined as ‘post-cinema’. This is merely digital reconstruction, which no matter how awe inspiring and breath taking, is completely contradictory as to what cinema is in its purest definition. Cinema is to capture something, a moment in time and space with a camera and preserve it for all time. This crosses the line as we play God instead of artist.

As we continually demonstrate our lacking ability to say or create anything new we simply obsess over how good it was ‘back then’ and do anything to recreate those glory days. The most enjoyable parts of ‘Rogue One’ are when it feels most reminiscent and recognisable to the original Star Wars, which defeats the point of telling new stories or making new films. Why not simply watch the original films again and again?  They still exist. They always will. That is what cinema is, immortality. Celluloid is immortality, it preserves the mortal soul forever and captures a time and place which will always exist. The greatest performances of the greatest actors will live on and in doing so, so will they as cinema will never fade, never diminish or alter in its beauty or its clarity. James Dean will live forever. Marlon Brando will live forever. Peter Cushing will live forever. But it is inhuman to reanimate them from beyond the grave without their consent, to play God in this perverse puppet show of necromancy. Let them rest, they have lived and they have died. They have given us so much which we can cherish forever. Our obsession with the past must end or it will destroy our future. It will also destroy our past and reduce all that made it sacred and beautiful, meaningless.

Celluloid is immortality. Treasure it.