16 movie characters who refused to stay dead
From Star Wars' Emperor Palpatine and Darth Maul to Fast & Furious' Letty and Han, let's take a look at the heroes (and villains) who somehow cheated death
Film Features Darth Vader
There are lots of great things about fictional characters, but one of the most convenient is their ability to come back to life despite onscreen deaths, years of apparent dormancy, and even their actors occasionally swearing off returning until the right story comes along. Horror villains like Dracula come back at the drop of a hat, of course, but we’re talking about the people who seemed like they were meant to stay dead, suddenly roaring back to life through sequels, careful plotting, and lots of audience subterfuge.
Since one of those characters, Chris Hemsworth’s Tyler Rake, is set to make a return from the dead this week in Extraction 2, we’ve been thinking a lot about the best examples of characters who just can’t stay dead, no matter how long it takes filmmakers to bring them back in the first place. So, from sci-fi favorites to action movie heroes, here are 16 characters who were conveniently resurrected, sometimes decades after their apparent deaths, in chronological order.
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The Emperor being alive was some lazy as BS. They went from a nice new direction in Last Jedi, to the mess of ROS because incels who never saw the originals as they happened or incels who did see the originals as they happened, cried that TLJ wasn’t for them. Fuck off with that shit.I remember Maul coming back in the cartoon and like Boba, I knew he would come back in some form down the road because that’s a cool B character and not the actual main villain of 6 movies.Also Steve Trevor “coming back” in WW84 was dogshit.
There was nothing terribly new about The Last Jedi, it started as an inferior remake of the first episode of the first Battlestar Galactica episode ‘33′ (despite that being made for TV for 50-100 times less and being over 13 years earlier) bolted to the children’s picture book version of Lord of War (people sell arms to both sides of a war, who would have thought?).Havin said that, for better or worse they gave Rian Johnson a pretty free hand with what he could do and given there were some potentially interesting directions the next film could have gone, the fact they spent as much as they could turning to the camera and giving The Last Jedi the finger by directly addressing a point it made and then reversing/contradicting it was both puerile cowardice and very juvenile on top of making a grotesquely bad film with The Rise of Skywalker.
Who the fuck outside of 100,000 people watched Battlestar Galactica. Only creeps who wanted to sleep with the new cylon! Now if you were talking about the 70’s one which was a rip off Star wars and Star Trek, then I would read any of this.
A lot of people watched the BSG remake.
I know, I was just laughing at the idea that the majority of people who saw a Star Wars movie would know anything about the BSG TV show. Which had probaby low millions of fans.
It was sure new as far as Star Wars was concerned. The idea that anyone could be strong in the Force not only made sense, it got us away from the tired chosen one narrative. Then RoS pulled right back to the claim that there are basically two highly Force-positive families in the entire universe. If the Force flows through every living thing then surely it would be like athleticism or intelligence, consistently stronger in some families but also popping up unexpectedly in specific individuals. That was Rey. Plus the ideas that the Jedi credo was flawed and the possibility of a way forward that wasn’t bifurcated into light and dark sides, gave legs to Ren’s idea that he and Rey could lead something new (even if she rejected it). Again, for a SW movie there was a lot to chew on.
It was sure new as far as Star Wars was concerned. The idea that anyone could be strong in the Force not only made sense, it got us away from the tired chosen one narrative.That argument never made sense to me. It was the prequels that had all the nonsense about “midichlorians” and “chosen ones”. The original movies had none of that. You didn’t have to be from a great family to be a Jedi. Even weird green muppets like Yoda could be a Jedi. It was all about the training like it was Karate or something.
Eh not sure I agree with that entirely. “The Force is strong with this one” was from SW. Vader pitching Luke that they would be unstoppable together as rules of the galaxy was ESB. The idea that Leia could be turned to the dark side in place of Luke (with similar results due to her lineage) was RotJ. The prequels just laid it on extra thick, what with the whole immaculate conception thing. And like it or not, the prequels count in terms of the overall storyline.
Well, sort of. But even “the Force is strong with this one” implied that was something that was non-obvious as opposed to self-evident from being a Skywalker.
I was also very, very disappointed by the turn the new trilogy took. TLJ could have acted as a bit of a reset for the franchise. Predestination? Not important. Two sides of the Force? False dichotomy.Yoda’s force ghost even shows up being all: “Burn it all down,” as in fuck tradition, fuck the Order — fuck all of it. Let’s start over and do things differently.And then RoS ignored all that, and resurrected not only the Emperor, but the Chosen One narrative. It’s really too bad, because the Star Wars universe is so much more interesting when dealing with shades of grey (especially when it comes to Force-sensitive people).
Han is a perfect example of your final point. He’s a survivor who until being lured into the Rebellion (for money) didn’t really care about light v dark sides, and even though he didn’t believe in the Force per se, was almost certainly strong in it since he seemed to get out of a whole lot of tight spots. He’s the type who if identified young by the right people could very well have been trained as a Jedi.
I also didn’t love the ‘weapons dealers enrich themselves while everyone else suffers’ bit. Historically speaking, that would parallel early WW1 US foreign policy: isolationism combined with a willingness to arm all sides.The Empire, and by extension the First Order, are supposed to be like Nazi Germany. Once they control a system (or country, in Earth terms), they put its industry to work by force. The owners do get rich, so long as they toe the party line. They certainly don’t get to produce X-wings and TIE fighters at the same time.
The laziest, really. I always give movies like that one a wide berth in terms of believability, and certainly did so with TLJ.The Emperor having been alive all along and somehow building a fully-staffed megafleet in the middle of nowhere — with each vessel having the destructive power of a Death Star — was a bridge too far, though.To put it on GoT terms, imagine if it had been revealed in season 8 that Viserys was still alive, and had somehow gathered a thousand dragons and an impossibly massive army to conquer Westeros… I mean, come on…
God I had forgotten some of those plot points. That movie really was a POS.
I like that they clearly based the Episode 9 Emperor design (pale blue corpse suspended from the ceiling by its head) off of Dr Chanard from Hellraiser 2. There wasn’t much to the movie, but that’s the case for at least half of the Star Wars movies, and I appreciated some of the weirdo visual designs in Episode 9.
It’s so funny because when the movie ended I was just happy Star Wars was over with. Silly me! lol!
Sitting through a 150-minute movie just to be glad it’s over is certainly a choice, I guess.
The start of it I was excited for it but by half way through it I just was ready for it to be over with. Not like how say the original I was excited/sad Jedi was the end of just excited for Revenge ending. No by the time of ROTS was getting into “full gear” I was ready for the movies to end and I never would have to watch another again.
Technically, most of the stuff on this list is lazy, though. Even if some end up becoming popular decisions.
I was fine with Palpatine coming back. I think they needed to tone down the number of ships though that were rebuilt. Like two or three max. And then only have what’s left of the rebels be what stops them. They made everything just too big, and there wasn’t a real reason to do so.
I’m going to go as far as to say that Agents of SHIELD did not waste the extra time several seasons of TV had over the movies in developing its characters as well as storylines and hence equalled if not surpassed the movies in the most important area of all, storytelling.
Jean Grey carries a lot of tension in her neck.
Jean Gray’s movie roles drive me bonkers. In the comics, she got to be *good* phoenix for a pretty long run before her power (or the dumb-ass “phoenix force” if you like that retcon) overcomes her good nature. In the movies, she *never* gets the opportunity to be the OP good hero. If Marvel ever brings the X-Men into the MCU, I hope Jean and Captain Marvel get to have tea and beat up bad guys together for a while.
Common! this guy isn’t even human 🧙🏻♂️
I think a distinction should be made between characters who died meaningful deaths and were intended to stay dead but did not for one reason or another (some good, some not, some intended at the time of their death, some retconned years later) versus characters who were obviously coming back. Like, did anyone (even children) think that the events of Avengers Infinity War would be permanent? There was another Avengers movie coming a year later, it was obvious that the snap was being undone, the fun was in seeing how.Same thing with Neo, he died looking like this so him being resurrected should not have been surprising.
Repeating Col. Miles in Avatar 2, instead of having a new villain was a criticism of mine. I didn’t want to bring Neo back for Matrix 4, but there was no stopping it. Same with Agent Coulson, which I feel undermines the first Avengers a little. I rolled my eyes when I heard one of the cartoons brought back a sliced-in-two Darth Maul, and I groaned even harder learning of Hector Barbosa’s return for whatever Pirates movie that was. Every resurrected character in Fast and Furious has driven me to quit that franchise because nothing matters. I think I hate this trope, lol. The only one here that works is saving half the universe in Endgame, given the nature of that story literally needing that to happen, rather than it being fan service (which even No Way Home has gotten some criticism for) or a shameless way to extend a franchise. And that’s why Endgame is the only one here that feels like it doesn’t really count.
I’ll say, with both Coulson and Maul, bringing them back ultimately worked because of what it let them do with the characters. Agents of SHIELD was shaky at times in terms of quality but we got to get a lot more out of the Coulson character than we did in the movies and having him there as the centerpiece for this new show got viewers watching and caring about the new characters (almost all of whom ended up being better than Coulson, plus they ended up killing him for real eventually anyway).And Maul’s run on Clone Wars and Rebels made him one of the best recurring Star Wars villains IMO. It was dumb how they brought him back (his brother Savage Opress, and I wish I were kidding on the name) found him with a droid spider torso and cleaned him up and died once he was all better) but it ultimately worked.
It always felt weird that the EXACT SAME kind of fall was survived by Luke Evans, but not fucking Wonder Woman.
I don’t agree with the premise here: Extraction ended with the reveal (yes it was ambiguous but, like, BARELY) that Hemsworth was alive. Awfully different than, say, Alien 3.
“Chris Hemsworth’s Tyler Rake, is set to make a return from the dead this week in Extraction 2…”Reeeeaaaaally scraping the bottom of the listicle ideas barrel, huh
Darth Maul and Boba Fett were both stupid. Maul because he somehow survived when Qui-Gon didn’t and because it was some dumb surprise twist in Solo for people who didn’t watch the cartoon. Boba Fett was dumb because for a giant badass he goes out in the dumbest way possible, then comes back to life and decides to be a crime boss just because.One I would add to the list is Ash from Evil Dead 2, kind of. He gets possessed by the Evil Dead and then manages to fight it off, unlike everyone else we have seen where once they are possessed you have to kill them to stop them.
Fuckin’ “justice for Han”. Way to turn a justly fan-favourite character into a recurring annoyance.
It just struck me looking at the pic above. We all talk about how The Rock and Vin Diesel are giant now due to crazy work out routines and possible chemical enhancements but compare 2011 Michelle Rodriquez to today and she is huge too. I was watching D&D the other day and she has muscles on top of muscles now.
*Ahem*
The A.V. Club
Never saw the movie(s), but I’m assuming.
Just watched Avatar2 last night. Not just the colonel, but Grace as well, let’s be fair. Kiri was created as a result of how they attempted to save Grace in the first movie. She’s a resurrected version of Grace and Eywa in the same body.
There was a great parallel with her and the Colonel. They even had Spider be attached to both of them. It’ll be interesting to see where they go with it, but I’m pretty sure the story will end with Kiri becoming Eywa in full, and the planet finally becoming a properly sentient being.
Buffy
“Somehow, Gandalf survived.” – Aragorn, probably.
Somehow, the dictates of late-stage capitalism required that we find a way for Palpatine to return…