Death is not the end! From the new robot Walt Disney to Mountainhead, movies are fuelled by immortality; The Guardian, June 6, 2025

 Stuart Heritage, The Guardian; Death is not the end! From the new robot Walt Disney to Mountainhead, movies are fuelled by immortality

"The catalyst is the recently announced Disneyland show Walt Disney – A Magical Life, which will feature as its star attraction an animatronic recreation of Walt Disney. This, according to Josh D’Amaro, Disney experiences chair, will give visitors a sense of “what it would have been like to be in Walt’s presence”. However, Disney’s granddaughter Joanna Miller is convinced that this is not what Disney the man would have wanted. In a Facebook post that was stinging enough to earn her an audience with the Disney CEO, Bob Iger, Miller said Disney was “dehumanising” her grandfather. “The idea of a robotic Grampa to give the public a feeling of who the living man was just makes no sense,” she wrote. “It would be an impostor, people are not replaceable. You could never get the casualness of his talking, interacting with the camera, [or] his excitement to show and tell people about what is new at the park. You cannot add life to one empty of a soul or essence of the man.”

As recently as a decade ago, this would have been the stuff of bad science fiction – a woman worried that a multinational corporation is bringing a dead relative back to life against his wishes, like a warped nonconsensual Westworld – but no more. As an entertainment concept, post-humanism feels worryingly current.

After all, the subject forms the backbone of Jesse Armstrong’s new film Mountainhead. Set in a world of bro-y tech billionaires that is only half a degree removed from our own – one in which AI-created misinformation has already caused society to start to erode – the inciting force of all the dark chaos that unfolds is Steve Carell’s character, who finds himself with a pressing need and an increasingly tight deadline to become transhuman. In other words, his body is failing and only technology can help him ward off the inevitability of death.

And this is no flight of fancy. As recently as this year, scholars have been sounding alarms about Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain implant company. In a Politico article illuminating the growing tension between the religious right and Musk’s views on extending human life beyond normal mortality, Alexander Thomas, of the University of East London, pointed out that transhumanism ultimately means that “the 8 billion people alive today simply don’t matter – genocide and wars are mere ripples, as long as some survive, and Musk is the one that needs to survive”."