10 Movie Characters Brought Back From The Dead In The Worst Way

The death of a character can offer any number of things to a movie, whether it be a huge emotional moment that will leave the audience in tears, something to move the plot forward and provide a motivation for others, or even some comic relief.

One thing that has become clear over the years, however, is that passing to the other side is not always as final as it may seem. Dead movie characters often have a way of finding themselves back among the living - and not always for the better.

Whether diving into a full resurrection using magic or a lightning strike, bringing back a soul and inserting it into another body, or rewriting what has come before so that that character never actually died in the first place, bringing someone back from beyond the grave has its risks.

Not only can it diminish the original death scene, death itself as an aspect can lose its emotional weight if an audience knows it can just be undone. Those are the potential pitfalls even if a resurrection is done well, something that can not be said about what happened with the ten characters on this list.

Star Wars is a franchise that has brought characters back from beyond the grave before, whether as force ghosts, Kylo Ren's (Adam Driver) memory of Han Solo (Harrison Ford), or the reveal that Darth Maul managed to survive being sliced completely in half by a lightsaber.

However, bringing Emperor Palpatine back for Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker was something else entirely. Darth Vader's (James Earl Jones) final act of turning against the Emperor, and killing him for the sake of his son, was one of the biggest moments in Star Wars history. To bring Ian McDiarmid back at all was always going to feel like a slap in the face - something that seemingly eluded Lucasfilm during the development of the ninth mainline chapter.

This would have been the case even if it had been done in an intriguing or interesting way, but it wasn't. Instead, Palpatine's return was first confirmed in Episode IX's opening crawl in the same way Episode I spoke of the taxation of trade routes, followed by Poe Dameron's (Oscar Isaac) explanation that the late Sith Lord had "somehow" returned.

It's perfectly reasonable for Poe, nor any of the characters on screen, to have any clue how the Emperor returned, but surely the audience deserved at least some kind of explanation. Instead, Palpatine's return marked arguably the lowest point of a movie, and a wider trilogy, that was crammed with low points.