First Look at De-Aged De Niro in ‘The Irishman’ is…Something
I want to see Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman as much as any film fanatic. And I love Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino like any warm-blooded American movie aficionado. Nothing — and I mean NOTHING — can stop my excitement for the epic crime drama.
But these first images of a digitally de-aged De Niro from the movie are not that great. They aren’t as bad as they could have been and I don’t think they’ll be quite the distraction that some fear. However, the movie will be relying on the de-aging technology A LOT so we need to get comfortable seeing Robert De Niro like…this:
The image above comes from an official Netflix tweet hyping the movie (below). De Niro definitely looks younger but he feels fake. The picture honestly reminds me of a still from a video game. Robert De Niro: Call of Duty! Again, not as bad as I had feared but certainly not great. To be fair, the other images in the tweet instill much more confidence.
De-aging is hard, it’s a tricky technology that attempts to convince your brain that you’re looking at a completely real person when you know that you’re not. It’s a necessary evil though, especially for a movie like this. I’d much rather have a de-aged De Niro, even with its limitations, than a bunch of younger actors playing him as the story progresses. He happens to resemble an action figure, so what? That doesn’t mean his performance will be bad or the movie will be weak. And maybe it’ll all look a lot better in motion.
This whole experience just goes to show that no one can completely master technology, not even Martin Scorsese. Technology is a wild beast that no one can truly tame.
Well, except maybe James Cameron. That guy seems to have a pretty good handle on it.
