I just want to mention I have played some wonderful video games with facial expressions that look exactly human so I think it can be done. Ben is trickier than Jen though because his features don’t look exactly human but I’m sure they can get some Pixar animator in to make it look fantastic even in live action
Ben will be a huge challenge to do as well
as I hope they can do, but I also think it’s a very different challenge from She Hulk.
His face will need to move in complex ways to convey emotion, and should do so in a way that the “rocks” don’t bend, but move in relation to their position with the rocks around them. I hope someone smarter than me can pull that off.
We have two examples - Korg and Ben from Fant4stic, and I hope the upcoming Ben is leaps and bounds better than either of those.
I have to grudgingly admit Fant4stic Ben had some promising moments. The design was absolutely terrible, but with that terrible design, there were moments in which he moved well and looked “real” (and also moments he didn’t). They weren’t very ambitious with his face and while it generally looked “real” it had limited expressions.
Korg is much more expressive, but also looks somewhat fake and cartoony to me. His textures also didn’t work as well as Fant4stic’s Ben to me.
As I touched on previously, She Hulk is a very different challenge because she has a human face. And while they don’t have to work with complicated mechanics, they need to convince our brains that it’s a real face. And since our brains are very attuned to human faces, those brain’s aren’t going to be fooled by CGI’s bull s***. I’ve never seen a video game that pulled it off, but video games aren’t my thing, so my knowledge is limited.
