10 Worst Performances In Otherwise Awesome 2016 Movies

By all accounts, Brit film director Gareth Edwards’ Rogue One was a more than worthy addition to the Star Wars franchise. Not only did many a critic rave about the spin-off prequel, it also ranks as last year’s fourth highest grossing film and has scored itself a couple of Academy Award nominations along the way too.

It wasn’t entirely without its criticisms, however, and many of these centred around the digital resurrection of characters from the original Star Wars films via mo-cap and other such crafty movie technologies. One character to reappear in CGI hologram form was a young Princess Leia (RIP Carrie Fisher) towards the end of the film, though this wasn’t too bad as it was confined to a brief lead-in scene.

Digitally resuscitating Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin, however, was quite an ill-advised move. The character gets a lot more screen time than hologram Princess Leia and let’s just say it’s more than obvious that Tarkin has pretty much been cut and pasted from films of Star Wars past.

The capabilities of CGI today are tremendous, but not so much that they can digitally revive a living human character apparently. At least not without that resurrected character’s performance coming off as out of place and ultimately distracting.

Of course, this isn’t Peter Cushing’s fault. After all, he’s been dead for over twenty years. Nor is it really Guy Henry’s – the British actor who provided Tarkin’s motion capture and voice work for Rogue One – fault either.

Ultimately, the blame falls on whoever thought it would a good idea to use a long-dead actor’s likeness combined with technology that isn’t as clever or realistic as it likes to think it is to bring back an iconic character. Come on guys, this is Star Wars not Coachella.