Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/05/30/deep-spock.html
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I never objected to Quinto’s appearance. But his voice is all wrong for Spock. I know this is mostly me and a personal view, but the voice was what made Spock so iconic for me. Not the ears, not the eyebrows, not the Vulcan greeting. That deep, sonorous voice. So while this is interesting, without changing Quinto’s sometimes annoying voice it falls really flat for me.
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I liked Quinto’s Spock and had no issue with his voice, but I agree that it’s incongruous to mix it with Nimoy’s face.
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I think once this sort of technology becomes a little more commonplace we’ll find directors intentionally avoiding camera angles at which the trickery fails. Overall, the look is quite convincing but to really pull it off on a professional level, having a sound alike voice is needed to. Fortunately, that tech also exists and is improving by leaps and bounds so, soon, nothing we see will be trustworthy - but the new John Belushi movies will be great.
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I’m afraid we’ll find studios intentionally avoiding hiring real actors. One day we’ll have cheap holograms instead of live impersonators, too. 
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I only just now noticed that old Spock’s ears aren’t pointed. They look pretty much like Leonard Nimoy’s actual ears. Is there an in-universe explanation for this?
Hmm… still seems mostly Quinto to me.
If you haven’t read (or seen) “The Futurological Congress,” the main plot deals with this issue of characters without corpuscles. The evolving results of abandoning objective reality in film construction is…difficult to accurately predict. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film)
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Agreed. Ethan Peck on Discovery (and soon his own show!) does a much better job. Quinto just tried to be Nimoy to me. Peck finds the middle ground of his own performance and Nimoy-isms that make it wonderful.
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Already got it and the result was not really good, even if the opening was catchy.
Seriously, a studio could mache a serial or even a full lenght movie without using actors even before WWII. the problem is to make a decent screenwriting with an interesting story and good characters. I the Star Trek franchise there’s an example. The animation was low standard but the stories were on far of the TOS episodes.
Look again, they are most certainly pointed. It is clearly visible when he turns to face Quinto Spock in the beginning.
FWIW, neither Quinto nor Peck need to “sound” like Leonard Nimoy, we should simply expect them to “talk” like him - Quinto’s Spock is from a parallel universe ffs, any number of things would have made his “voice” different from Mr Nimoy’s.
Not quite parallel, Quinto’s universe diverged from Nimoy’s, didn’t it?
I was fine with casting Quinto as Spock, it would be silly if we expected every new actor to take on an existing role to look and sound like their predecessors.
The thing that I hated about the way they portrayed Spock in the new movies is that they essentially took his most defining character trait—his ability to remain calm, collected and logical in any situation—and threw it out the window to make him into Bruce Freaking Banner.
- Kids talking smack about Spock’s mixed-race heritage? Spock is gonna flip his lid and give a violent beat-down.
- Kirk needling Spock about his momma’s death? Spock is gonna flip his lid and give a violent beat-down.
- Kirk steals Spock’s death scene from Star Trek II? Oh DAMN you know Khan is gonna get a violent beat-down.
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“But it also fails more completely; it’s still Quinto at odd angles.”
I watched the clip without first reading your comment, and I automatically assumed there was something more subtle going on; It appeared to me they were deliberately using the effect to varying degrees throughout, fading between the two actors.
As for the voice, I tend to agree that Quinto is unconvincing as a young Nimoy-Spock. But old Nimoy-Spock sounds like he was really struggling through his dentures in these final appearances, and I find that incredibly distracting.
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