Kyle Chandler has aged like such fine wine that it took me a second to realize he was playing younger on HBO’s Lanterns. The show hops between time periods and the actors don wigs and hair dye and occasionally a little digital makeup to make the time jumps more believable. It’s surprising how well it works to have Chandler play Hal Jordan across four-plus decades. He’s aged since his Early Edition days, but when he’s playing a ’90s era Hal I just see a young do-gooder in a stuffy superhero suit. I don’t find myself looking for the difference and flaws in the aging technology. That’s not always the case. De-aging is an art and we are all connoisseurs quite adept at recognizing the good and being appalled by the bad.
But why is the bad so bad? We still get lots of laughable de-aging—often in really expensive projects! I’ve watched Ride Or Die twice and delight at the costumes and the writing and performances, and cringe every time Octavia Spender and Hannah Waddingham play themselves 20 years younger, which are about as believable as Michael C. Hall as teenage Dexter the serial killer. Dexter became notorious for the bad wigs the show slapped on that man to “transform” him into a teenager, but they did not mask the fact that Hall was in his 30s. Ride Or Die at least took the time to airbrush away wrinkles and give both women a little youthful glow, but it still feels as cheap, as unbelievable as a Dexter wig.
De-aging effects are on a scale. On one end is Dexter and his wig: cheap, demands epic suspension of disbelief by the audience. On the far other side is the work being done by Lola VFX, which became the go-to effects house for de-aging after its work on David Fincher’s The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button. That feels like magic. Lanterns and Ride Or Die both sit comfortably closer to the center of the de-aging scale, with Lanterns leaning towards magic and Ride Or Die…not.
The best de-aging is hard to do. Let’s go ahead and stay in the superhero genre for this and use an example more recent than Benjamin Button—the Ant-Man franchise. Before the rushed and ultimately botched release of Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania, the franchise was a terrific example of great effects work. Owing to flashbacks and general comic book nonsense, the Ant-Man movies have had to depict plenty of actors into their younger selves. I’m fairly confident Michael Douglas has had his face digitally manipulated like Play-Doh in nearly every single MCU appearance he’s made. But the standout is when he had to share a scene with Hayley Atwell where he was digitally aged down and she was aged up. The scene is set in 1989 and she’s got little wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth and her hair (a big wig) is brushed with gray but you can’t tell which lines on her face were painted on in a movie set trailer and which came later from the hands of a digital effects artist. She looks like a woman fighting the good fight for decades despite the actress being in her 30s. We know exactly what Michael Douglas looked like in 1989 and this de-aged version of him looks nearly as good as he actually did in Wall Street.
That was by the design of the digital effects artists of Lola VFX, which was already known at that point for Benjamin Button and making huge Chris Evans look like just a little guy in the first Captain America film. Lola artists worked closely with Marvel and Disney and coordinated everything so they could pull the scene off as believably as possible. They used both Michael Douglas and a much younger stand-in to make the character move like a 40-year old man and not a 70-year-old one. They also watched a lot of ’80s Michael Douglas films as reference. “[I]t made us work harder, because the audience already knew what he looked like at that age,” Trent Claus of Lola VFX told Vulture at the time. “There wasn’t a whole lot of leeway.”
Using those references, they added fat back to his cheeks. They shrank his ears and nose. Shifted the muscles in his face, removed blood visible vessels and added a youthful glow to his skin. They even gave him a digital neck left—pulling skin on his neck back to where it would have more likely resided in 1989. Claus speaks of the work the same way a sculptor might. “What’s really important is the way his face moves as he speaks, the way that the muscles in the face have changed over time, the way the skin reacts to those muscles,” he told Vulture. “To sell the effect you have to look at the way [the face] looks in motion.” The work Claus and Lola VFX did is good enough it holds up more than 10 years later. Then they came back and did it again to Michelle Pfeiffer in Ant-Man And The Wasp, and the results looked just as good, proving that a whole crew of very skilled artists can make older actors look young again with just a lot of time and Disney/Marvel money.
It’s not a surprise that Ride Or Die and Lanterns didn’t go this route. Lola-level VFX are expensive and time-consuming, and if you run out of either time or money you will be left with a boondoggle like Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania, where Marvel went the much cheaper route of blurring some wrinkles and slapping on some wigs. We basically all did the same on Zoom calls during the pandemic. I did not have to touch my makeup once from April 2020 to my first office visit in the summer of 2021 because Zoom could blur away all blemishes and even give me some healthy color. The technology is effectively the same and is seen in every filter you use on Snapchat, TikTok, or Instagram. A simple algorithm makes digital tracking points on the face and applies a digital mask onto those points. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough.
Except it really isn’t when you’re watching a TV show that cost millions of dollars to produce. The makers of Lanterns seem to understand this. And thus far the younger Kyle Chandler has had to look, the darker and blurrier the scene. We see young Hal Jordan on a fuzzy TV screen and on moodily lit sets. When we do see a younger Hal in the sunlight, he’s also only meant to be a decade younger than the one in the 2016 timeline. The wigs and Snapchat filter effect work just fine in that context.
The problem with Ride Or Die and so many other bad examples of de-aging, like whatever they did to Winona Ryder in the Stranger Things season five flashbacks, is not understanding the limitations of the technology. In episode two of Ride Or Die, there’s a whole lovely scene of the two leads as twentysomething women bonding that’s all tight closeups in a well-lit car, but it’s very clearly two older women in wigs. It’s almost as comical as watching a 31-year-old Maya Erskine in a mushroom hair wig bitch out a 13-year-old boy in Pen15, which starred Erskine and Anna Konkle as 13-year-old girls. But that was part of the joke in Pen15. It’s in Ride Or Die. It takes real technique to pull off digital de-aging. The crapshoot happens when filmmakers or TV creators think a wig and a blur filter are enough.
The point of these de-aging effects is that they’re supposed to be special. You are meant to wonder how they pulled it off, or not even notice the effects were there. Wigs and a filter that’s two steps above a Snapchat one are just normal tools in the toolbox of any filmmaker in 2026. There is no marvel in them in this day and age. There’s only a crapshoot.
Alex Cranz writes about the intersection between pop culture and technology.
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