And by the same argument, what’s stopping the people who can make such sophisticated masks from using them to promote the agenda of Nazi organizations? The same decency and good taste which arguably should’ve prevented such CGI zombification in the first place.
Arguably, using the likeness of a dead actor makes a movie much less real than simply using another living human being.
Within your argument: My argument is that ILM did not recreate Cushing’s persona, but Tarkin’s persona, which is fictional and happens to have Peter Cushing’s likeness.
I think it would be very bad, dishonest, and ultimately pointless to have someone dead say something he didn’t say when alive and even more if it counterdicts his own known beliefs.
But a character is a fictional persona. In this case, these are characters that are really attached to certain physical features, and the lack of those features would probably diminish the enjoyment of the spectacle.
If it makes it more real, or more unreal, well that’s another debate, and I might be with you on that one. RO’s Tarkin sometimes got me out of the movie, precisely because top-notch technology only proved that there are things in human behaviour that go far beyond the perfect likeness, and in every slight difference with Peter Cushing’s acting and physical language fake Tarkin rang a bell to me; but that’s not based on an ethical judgement of the VFX procedure.
Outside you argument: Decency and good taste are not to be regulated in a non authoritarian society. Only law should, and if there is (as it was) an agreement between parts representing the interested parts, who are we to judge?