In the pages of Marvel and DC Comics, it has become something of a running joke that dead superheroes rarely stay down for long.
Captain America, Batman, Superman and Spider-Man have all spent time in an apparently lifeless condition, only to be miraculously restored to merrily continue their adventures. The Dark Knight was revealed to have been transported to the stone age after apparently dying at the hands of Darkseid in 2009’s Final Crisis series, and had to travel back through the centuries to take up the cape and cowl once again.
Meanwhile, Peter Parker spent the best part of two years locked in a corner of Otto Octavius’s mind after the supervillain transferred his consciousness into Spider-Man’s body in the 2012 Dying Wish episode. Think that’s outlandish? Steve Rogers (Captain America) was eventually revealed to have been phasing in and out of time for two years, rather than being bounced from this mortal coil, following the landmark The Death of Captain America comic in 2007.
Whether such outlandish revelations would work on the big screen is open to question. Warner Bros’ DC Extended Universe has already borrowed heavily from 1992’s The Death of Superman for the storyline in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and sequel Justice League, which saw Kal-El destroyed by Doomsday, only to be brought back by something called a Mother Box.
But if director Zack Snyder had used the original storyline in full, we would have been treated to the high whimsy of four replacement “men of steel” emerging in the aftermath of Superman’s demise. It is probably enough if I tell you that one of these, Cyborg Superman, is basically a robot, and another, named Steel, wears an armoured suit and wields a hammer.
But if DC and Marvel’s big-screen writers aren’t yet supping quite so hard from the hallucinogenic Kool-Aid as their print counterparts, they are at least eyeing that tantalising straw with greedy peepers. The past week has seen news break that Chris Pine’s Steve Trevor, whose heroic demise in last year’s Wonder Woman perfectly rounded off the emotional and romantic arc of Patty Jenkins’ origins tale set in the First World War, will inexplicably be back in the upcoming 80s-set sequel.
And anyone who thinks the cavalcade of superheroes who met their end following Thanos’s climactic finger click in Avengers: Infinity War are going to stay murdered has clearly not been keeping one eye on Marvel’s upcoming slate, which features new solo outings for the apparently dead Spider-Man and Guardians of the Galaxy (the latter cosmic superhero team’s numbers having been uncomfortably reduced to Rocket Raccoon and possibly Sean Gunn’s Kraglin .)
Moreover, the trend seems to have jumped the species barrier from comic-book flicks into mainstream fantasy and sci-fi. The next Star Trek movie is due to star Chris Hemsworth’s George Kirk, AKA James T’s dear old dead dad, despite him having copped it at the hands of angry Romulan rebels in 2009’s Star Trek. Nobody knows quite how the team will explain this one away, but we can assume it has something to do with Hemsworth having become a huge star in the intervening years as a result of his Marvel forays as Thor.
To be fair to the makers of the current Star Trek movies, the long-running space saga has been doing this since at least 1984, when a certain taciturn Vulcan was preposterously brought back as a memory-imbued clone of himself in The Search for Spock.
Trevor’s return in the upcoming Wonder Woman 1984 has its origins in some equally unsatisfying comic book episodes, which have variously seen the military man brought back to life as a dark-haired version of himself and replaced by a doppelganger from an alternative dimension. It could also be a sly nod to the classic television series starring Linda Carter, which featured father-and-son Steve Trevors across multiple timelines (originally a Second World War setting, then later in the modern day) played by the same actor, Lyle Waggoner, in a fairly damning indictment of bargain-bin 1970s casting conventions. The internet has also suggested Trevor could be a clone of himself, or resurrected by Wonder Woman using technology similar to Ra’s al Ghul’s Lazarus Pits, or simply a figment of Diana Prince’s imagination — though this hardly explains why he is wearing 80s threads in publicity shots.
If they insist on going down this ill-trodden path, Jenkins and her team need to avoid the spectacular blunders made by others before them. There was equally great excitement when it was revealed in trailers for last year’s Kingsman: The Golden Circle that Colin Firth’s dapper spy Galahad had survived his apparent demise in the original Kingsman. Bloggers queued up to speculate on how the suave secret agent might have escaped death. And yet the character’s eventual return — and the big tech-reveal that explained his resurrection — undermined everything that followed. Likewise, Superman’s return in Justice League was downright weird, though that may have been something to do with Henry Cavill’s ungainly CGI-assisted shave .
Perhaps the most subtly rendered example of a return from the dead in movie history is Gandalf’s resurrection in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, which is left almost entirely to viewers’ imaginations, just as it was in JRR Tolkien’s original fantasy tome. Such gentle sleight of hand worked because Middle Earth is a world of magic and wonder, overseen by hidden all-powerful deities. And herein lies the biggest clue to Trevor’s return, even if it will still probably end up feeling like another cheap Hollywood trick. For the DC universe — in particular Wonder Woman’s corner of it — is exactly the same.
