Everything About the AI-Generated Val Kilmer Movie is Depressing

Val Kilmer died last year. Before his passing, he had signed on to star in a movie, As Deep as the Grave, a historical drama about North America’s first female archaeologist, Ann Axtell Morris. Due to illness, Kilmer dropped out. Now, he’s ‘starring’ in the movie via an AI-generated simulacrum of his younger self. And it’s awful.

With the cooperation of Kilmer’s estate and his kids, the filmmakers decided to use generative AI to force a dead man into their movie. The trailer played this week at CinemaCon, the trade show for cinema exhibitors that now plays like Comic Con for some people. It revealed footage of fake Kilmer at various ages. The ‘filmmakers’, director Cooerte Voorhees and producer brother John, told Business Insider that, after spending ‘hours’ digging through archival footage to feed into the plagiarism machine, it took only seven minutes to generate the trailer’s final shot of young Kilmer.

The Voorhees insist that their use of AI is the most ethical it could be since they got the Kilmer family and estate’s permission, and that they only used the tech out of necessity. Mercedes Kilmer, Val’s daughter, said in a statement that her dad ‘always looked at emerging technologies with optimism as a tool to expand the possibilities of storytelling. He had collaborated with the filmmakers of Top Gun: Maverick in use of voice synthesis technology so that he could speak more clearly in the role following throat cancer treatment. Perhaps he would have been gung-ho for this revival. That doesn’t make its use any less creepy or the implications for the entertainment industry less unnerving.

Actor Jackson Rathbone, best known for the Twilight series, took to Twitter to call out the filmmakers, SAG-AFTRA, and Mercedes Kilmer for this movie. ‘This is truly the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen,’ he wrote, calling out the offenders as ‘gross.’ I’m with him. Jasper, you get it.

Let’s be clear here: the CGI figure in that trailer is not Val Kilmer. It’s a nostalgic copycat act of robbery from his past that ignores the man he aged into and the way he approached acting. Kilmer could be a d*ck but he was also a skilled and charismatic actor who liked to challenge himself and make weird choices. Some of his most iconic on-screen moments are those bursts of spontaneity that weren’t scripted or planned ahead of time. Only a tech bro loser who has absolute disdain for art would think the craft could be reduced to a formula.

This is why AI “filmmaking” will remain a gimmick, and a tired one few people truly want at that. Who is the audience for this act of digital necromancy? What demographic is absolutely aching for a quiet historical drama about a female archaeologist that also has a dead man computer ghost as one of its stars? What actor is going to want to “act” alongside this crap? It feels like this only exists for tech bros, greedy studio heads, and the families of dead people who want to keep the money train rolling in.

Also, you can tell it’s AI. Yes, the technology has greatly advanced from the days where everyone had 14 fingers, but the movement is still uncanny and the lip-sync is off. The contrast between the real movie and the AI scenes feels so obvious to me. And it just sucks that they decided to go with young Kilmer, as though the older one, who thought sickness for years and was marked by it, wasn’t marketable enough. Hope it was worth sucking up an entire town’s water supply, you vultures.