In an unsettling post miles away from his usual content (lost pairs of gloves and socks in New York, described by the star himself as a “visual haiku” of “loneliness in the Big City”), Tom Hanks, taking the helm of AI safety, warned his followers about the dangers of deepfakes.
“BEWARE!!” Tom Hanks wrote on Instagram in October 2023
“There’s a video out there of me promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me. I have nothing to do with it,” he declared, reassuring some avid fans who had been perturbed by this quite abrupt change of career.
Their fear was quashed: Hanks’ journey as a beloved actor could continue without being marred by any ungracious forms of dental promotion.
AI de-aging technology
As 2024 rolled around, mere months after Hanks’ dental debacle, it was revealed that he would be starring in Robert Zemeckis’ new film, Here.
Zemeckis has a full bounty of classics under his belt, having been the master who fashioned all three Back to the Future films, as well as two key features of Hank’s career: Forrest Gump and Castaway. But Zemeckis’ latest endeavour sees Hanks forced to collaborate with his pesky enemy of October 2023: AI.
In this instance, Hanks, alongside his Forrest Gump co-star Robin Wright, will see himself not the victim of dentistry, but of anti-aging technology.
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By GlobalDataHere is set both in the past, present, and future, and is based on Richard McGuire’s graphic novel of the same name. Shot from one singular perspective, decades unfurl in front of the viewers’ eyes. Hanks is now 67, but thanks to de-aging technology appears fresh-faced in the film, as though he’d just stepped off the set of Sleepless in Seattle, with Robin Wright getting the same treatment.
Here is not the only film that has used de-aging technology on its stars. 2023’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny saw Harrison Ford become spritely once more for the first sequence of the film.
With Indy’s hair reinvigorated with colour and his wrinkles smoothed over into the perfect amount of ruggedness, viewers were transported back to a Ford of the 80s, half expecting Sean Connery to appear from beyond the grave to cameo as Henry Jones.
Nostalgia versus AI
Notably, these instances of AI de-aging technology have relied heavily on a sense of nostalgia. The pairing of Tom Hanks and Robin Wright is particularly on the nose as they rekindle their chemistry from 1994’s Forrest Gump.
Indiana Jones revived the nostalgia of the 80s and the thrill of the original trilogy. It is reminiscent of the Abba Voyage tour, which brought the Swedish pop group to youthful life, exactly as they were in 1979.
The fallacy of de-aging
However, with this reliance on nostalgia, a problem arises: if we are to imagine that de-aging technology is to become the norm—like many other kinds of special effects that have emerged in the past few decades—we may enter a cinematic world in which nostalgia no longer exists.
Should Ford have begun his de-aging antics back in the 80s, and we were so very generously treated to an Indiana Jones trilogy every decade, there would have been no sense of romanticism in the original films when the reboot finally landed last year.
If AI de-aging becomes the norm, movie stars would be stripped of their sense of growth as actors—a feeling to which fans often cling lovingly. While Hugh Grant, for example, could have played a bumbling, floppy-haired romantic lead forever, we may then never have been gifted the joy that is Paddington 2, and his transformation into character acting.
The charm of his characters in Notting Hill and Four Weddings may have soured rather soon and lost all sense of sentimentality as we look back longingly at his round glasses and stammering proclamations of love.
It seems, then, that Hanks needs to reissue his Instagram post. Not to those intrigued by his foray into oral hygiene, but to the very filmmakers like Zemeckis who are tinkering with de-aging AI. The tech might be exciting now, but should it become ubiquitous, the very nostalgia on which it plays and uses to be effective may simply disappear.
If film stars stay young forever, there is little room for them ever to grow into something iconic, and no room at all for us to look back lovingly to the past.
