The Book Of Boba Fett Fixes One Of The Mandalorian Season 2's Strangest Mistakes
The second season of "The Mandalorian" brought the surprise appearance of Luke Skywalker. However, since Mark Hamill has aged quite a bit since filming "Return of the Jedi," a hefty amount of visual effects were required in order to bring back the young Jedi Master. Unfortunately, as talented as the VFX artists at Industrial Light & Magic have been time and time again, their digitally de-aged version of a younger Mark Hamill wasn't nearly as impressive as it should have been.
Thankfully, ILM took that criticism to heart, especially when another VFX artist, known as Shamook online, improved upon the digital character using Deepfake technology to create a superior version of Luke Skywalker. In fact, the visual effects house hired that Deepfake artist to utilize the morally questionable tech to help with future projects, and we're wondering if his talents were used to create the new and improved digital Luke Skywalker in the latest episode of "The Book of Boba Fett."
Luke Skywalker is Back and He Looks Great
In a series that is making "The Book of Boba Fett" title increasingly irrelevant, Luke Skywalker popped up again, this time training Grogu in the ways of the Jedi after the pint-sized, Force-sensitive creature left his adoptive father Din Djarin in the second season finale of "The Mandalorian." However, instead of appearing like a video game cinematic character who needed a little more time rendering, this version of young Luke Skywalker was damn near perfect. Just look at that shot above. Then take a look at this one too:
Lucasfilm
What makes this especially impressive is that, unlike Luke Skywalker's appearance in "The Mandalorian," there's no dim light for the de-aged character to hide in. It's typically much easier to create CGI characters and objects in darker settings because not as much detail is required. It's one of the reasons that the limited use of an entirely computer generated tyrannosaurus rex in "Jurassic Park" still looks great after 25 years. But this Luke Skywalker appears in broad daylight with plenty of sun, and he still looks amazing. Admittedly, there were a handful of shots that didn't look quite as good. Even so, this was a significant improvement over the character's previous return.
In case you need a reminder of how much of an improvement this is from the previous version, take a look:
Lucasfilm
However, what we're not sure of is whether or not Shamook actually worked on this episode. We've reached out to Disney for confirmation one way or the other, but even if that previous hire didn't work on this episode, ILM still clearly made some improvements behind the scenes and created a digital Luke Skywalker that was leaps and bounds better than its predecessor. Could this mean that it will be easier and more likely to see Luke Skywalker in future "Star Wars" TV shows? Only time will tell.
If you'd like to know more about why that original digital version of Luke Skywalker didn't look quite right, head over here.