Fede Álvarez claims he "fixed" Alien: Romulus' zombie Ian Holm for home release

Although opinions were mixed on last year’s Alien sequel Romulus, critics tended to find consensus on one point: The fake Ian Holm was an unpleasant addition to Fede Álvarez’s attempts to wrestle with the venerable horror franchise. Yes—as Álvarez has said on more than one occasion—there are in-universe reasons for his bit of digital necromancy, what with all the various Michael Fassbenders and Lances Henriksen running around in this gross-out version of space. And yes, Holm’s estate signed off on it. But it doesn’t change the fact that seeing an incredibly talented performance like Holm’s Ash—easily one of the best parts of the original Alien—get rendered down into meaningless fanservice through a blend of puppetry and CGI rubbed a lot of viewers the wrong way.

But don’t worry, Alien fans! Álvarez has heard your unhappiness, and has announced that he’s “fixed” the problem for the movie’s home release. By, uh, adjusting the CGI some. That’s what people were mad about, right?

This is per an interview that the Don’t Breathe director gave to Empire this week, saying that he, himself, was disappointed with the look of the Holm simulacrum, which was created by taking a cast of the veteran actor’s head made for Lord Of The Rings, building a puppet from it, and then applying CG and deepfake technique to try to ford the uncanny valley. “We just ran out of time in post-production to get it right,”Álvarez said. “I wasn’t 100 percent happy with some of the shots, where you could feel a bit more the CG intervention. So, for people that react negatively, I don’t blame them.”

Now, there’s obviously a disconnect happening here, because the major complaint people levied at the appearance of the Rook character wasn’t that it looked bad—although it didn’t look great—but that it was in the movie at all. Álvarez does not seem to be engaging with the fact that a lot of people genuinely don’t want to see dead actors’ likenesses get used in this way, because it’s ghoulish and weird and backwards-looking, etc., even if you could get it looking perfect. (Especially in that case, maybe.) Instead, he’s just promising to make its inclusion in his movie less obviously distracting: “We made it better for the release right now. I convinced the studio we need to spend the money and make sure we give the companies that were involved in making it the proper time to finish it and do it right. It’s so much better.” This new version apparently puts much more focus on the puppet, and less on the CGI, which we guess is a step in the right direction. (It feels a little better to our brains if it’s obvious you’re looking at something that’s just supposed to look like Holm, instead of direct mimicry.) But we’re not sure it even comes close to addressing the core of people’s complaints about the character’s existence in the first place.