In “Jurassic Park,” there’s a scene that has outlived the spectacle of dinosaurs themselves. And it’s often undermentioned.
As the park’s architects marvel at their own achievement, Ian Malcom delivers, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” It is a line that lands with weight in an age defined by digital resurrection.
We are no longer reviving prehistoric creatures. Instead, we are giving actors their “third day.” Or, at least, something like it. The film industry has begun to test the boundaries of mortality itself. The question is no longer whether technology can recreate a face — it can. Perhaps we should ask like Malcom and consider whether it should.
There is a line between honoring the dead and exploiting them. The emerging use of artificial intelligence to make zombies out of those passed away has erased that line. With the release of As Deep as the Grave and its spookily AI-generated rendering of Val Kilmer, the future of cinema is a moral vacuum. A trajectory dressed in the language of tribute and animated by something far more irreverent.
“Don’t fear the dead and don’t fear me,” the trailer intones. But perhaps we should. Because what we are doing with the dead is ghoulish.
The ethical terrain appears complicated. Kilmer, after all, suffered greatly from throat cancer. He had previously expressed gratitude for technologies that could restore his voice. And now the proceeds are going to his family! A charitable reading of this situation says that AI might extend the creative agency of artists whose bodies have failed them.
Yet it’s incredibly clear that Val had accepted these terms so that he might act again.
And now that he’s replaced, we reduce human life to assets. Defenders often reach for familiar analogies. We’ve always depicted the dead, they argue. Biopics, CGI recreations, voice acting, historical portrayals. In traditional filmmaking, even the most sophisticated CGI needs a person. There is a human being beneath the digital mask, a real presence mediating the role. The performance is interpretive. By contrast, AI-simulated likenesses mine the past for voice and expression.
Approximation in art is not a neutral act. It reshapes our expectations of what art is and what it requires.
The beauty of film has always been bound up in presence. An actor stands before a camera and offers something irreducibly human. To watch a performance is to encounter another person in a mediated, genuine sense. Great acting moves us because it’s both convincing and connective.
What happens when presence is replaced with something inhuman? When the actor themself is no longer present, though a shadow of them is?
Two dangers immediately emerge.
First, like something out of The Walking Dead, the living will be forced into competition with the dead. Studios will discover that a recognizable face is infinitely more manageable that a living performer. Why invest in emerging talent when the past can be endlessly recycled? We’re narrowing artistic possibilities. New voices will inevitably struggle to find work in an industry dominated by digital ghosts.
Second, there is a dilution of value. If a beloved actor’s likeness can be deployed anywhere, it loses its power. Scarcity, in art, is a feature. The fact that performances are finite, that careers begin and end, makes them inherently significant. If an actor is infinitely present they are, paradoxically, forgettable.
We live in a world of retrospective correction. “Jurassic Park” is often read as a story about unleashing forces that cannot be contained, but it is also about a world in which error is assumed to be reversible. Consequences can be managed after the fact like a misprinted line.
Because of this, the language of “tribute” rings hollow. A true tribute seeks to honor a life. It does not attempt to recreate that very life. It respects the finality of death while preserving memory.
There is something profoundly unsettling about this. It feels like a category mistake. To simulate the dead as if they were still active participants in our cultural life trivializes death. We turn what should be a space of reverence into a site of production.
There is, of course, a legal dimension to all this. Transferable rights to a person’s likeness spell out a potential for misuse. There’s a need for clearer, more stringent protections if this is becoming a new reality. Such measures would not solve every problem, but they would at least acknowledge that a person’s identity is not a commodity.
What kind of transformation are we willing to accept? And what has been lost in the process?
Art at its best is a meeting place between persons. It is finite and deeply human. To preserve that humanity is to insist that it remain a tool, not a substitute. The dead do not need to be resurrected for us to remember them. In fact, it may be precisely by letting them rest that we honor them most.
Let sleeping actors lie.
