This week, an Xfinity superbowl ad featuring the de-aged faces of the cast of Jurassic Park went viral for looking kind of strange. This is generally not surprising as digitally de-aging people almost never looks right, existing largely as a weirdly uncanny death mask over existing actors. When done to living actors it is embarrassing and a little silly, and when done to the dead it’s just kind of disrespectful. I kind of understand the utility in doing this narratively—but I do not think they should have done this.
All your Jurassic Park classic characters are here including Xfinity guy.
Digital de-aging has been around for ages and it always looks weird. I have become weirdly obsessed with the process over the years, from Ang Lee’s bizarre 120fps movie Gemini Man where Will Smith must fight his own disturbing looking clone, to John Lee’s oft-forgotten straight to Netflix Pee-wee's Big Holiday where they de-aged Pee Wee because Old Pee Wee is a bit of a contradiction in terms. They actually did this in the most recent season of Fallout to make Kyle MacLachlan young, and it looks kinda weird there too. The result is often a way too smooth image coupled with a jarringly old sounding voice. For a second I thought they did it in Wicked 2: For Good but it turns out they just got a younger guy who looked kinda like a badly de-aged Jeff Goldblum.
The ad itself is directed by the powerful comedy mind behind JoJo Rabbit, Taika Waititi, which makes sense because it’s also a poorly considered use of culturally loaded imagery. It cloyingly pitches a scenario where all of the problems of Jurassic Park are solved by the one Xfinity guy plugging in the shitty router that the company rents to you. You get to see all your friends having a super awesome time together and going to the spa and Dr. Alan Grant fully endorses the park. The entire tone of the commercial is very Reddit 8 years ago, so it is unsurprising that the reaction has been almost universal scorn.
“I think anybody who loved the movie Jurassic Park growing up always wondered what would have happened if everything could have gone right?” Diana Hicks the executive director of Xfinity brand marketing said in a behind the scenes promotional video.
Not really, Diana. Like I’ve played DinoPark Tycoon I guess but that sorta defeats the whole point of the movie. I get that it’s a superbowl ad, but I was raised in the ad industry and this feels like a prompt more than a pitch.
I don’t really begrudge anyone involved for getting a paycheck for this. Laura Dern and Sam Neill both seem very nice and they deserve to get that money. Whatever Sam needs to do to finance his delightful parasocial farm is fine. Goldblum doing smarmy, hammy shit is unsurprising, that’s kind of his entire career and generally he’s good at it. To the extent that you can trust a behind the scenes video for a superbowl ad, they all seem like they are having a fun time! Kind of a missed opportunity to get Wayne Knight involved if you ask me but he lost a lot of weight in the last few years and maybe that would present technical issues.
Hamburger.
While it is tempting to lambast a commercial for being soulless and crass, it’s important to remember that this is Jurassic Park and despite being a masterpiece it was built in a lab to sell cheeseburgers and cheap extruded plastic by way of lucrative cross promotion. We’re at like, what, seven movies now? This is in many ways the logical conclusion to much of what Spielberg has set in motion, from the weaponized use of nostalgia and timed brand synergy to digital de-aging. He used this technology with extremely weird results in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. It is also very funny that Industrial Light and Magic clarified to IGN that while they worked on the dinosaurs they did not handle the deaging.
This entire process takes so much work and always looks strange.
Despite all that, you cannot pull this crap with the first Jurassic Park movie specifically because it is one of the most tasteful uses of special effects in history. The story behind that movie’s production is a masterclass in prudence. They had Stan Winston and Phil Tippet on set, two of the greatest to ever do it when it comes to practicals and stop motion respectively, and through much of the production they were originally going to use Tippet’s stop motion before they eventually settled on then-revolutionary CG for half the shots, infamously leading Phil Tippet to remark “I think I’m extinct,” a comment that made it into the final script.
The part where all the animators take an acting class to pretend to move like dinosaurs is so cool.
The whole reason Jurassic Park still looks great decades later is because everyone knew when best to utilize an effect. It’s not that the somewhat smeary, low resolution dinosaurs look good, it’s that everyone involved in the production worked with each other and knew when an effect was believable. To quote Stan Winston, “If they didn’t look real, if you didn’t believe their skin, their flesh, their reality, their details, their eyes, their teeth, their mouth, everything about them, no matter how good the performances were, it wouldn’t be real. Cause you’d have something acting real but it didn’t look real.”
I don't agree with every part of this essay but they're cookin' through big parts of it.
If Xfinity had gotten the entire cast of Jurassic Park together and done a big silly ad where they were all older, the reaction would have been neutral to slightly positive. All three of them were in that last movie a few years ago! But who cares, this is not really about the ad, but something larger, which is that nothing “feels real” anymore.
It is not simply the creeping spread of AI although deepfaking is only going to get worse, it’s that images often lack tactility, weight and texture. Entire practicals will be built only for the end result to look like it was made in Blender, like the giant head of Oz in Wicked they hand crafted out of wood only to look kinda bad.
There will always be some solid counterexamples: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves shockingly melds practicals, tasteful compositing, and delightful puppetry for a movie that is way better than it has any right to be. And whether you like it or not, selling a truly absurd world is the entire bread and butter of the Avatar films at this point. But those are the exceptions.
It is a rare luxury for the people that do these effects to be given the proper time and cooperation. A bad idea is a bad idea, and the people that make these decisions were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
