"Somehow, Palpatine returned."
—Poe Dameron, The Rise of Skywalker
Unexplained Recoveries in live-action movies.
- Austin Powers: Dr. Evil kills Number 2 at the end of the first film. He is back in the second, and his death doesn't even get a Hand Wave. It is never directly mentioned—however, Number 2's face has some noticeable burns on it.
- Baron Munchausen in the Terry Gilliam film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen: "And that was only one of the many occasions on which I met my death, an experience which I don't hesitate strongly to recommend!" He follows it with a Happily Ever After. Well, that's because he's Baron Munchausen.
- Big Money Hustlas and its prequel Big Money Rustlas has guys who had died during the film become this trope during the credits.
- The Thin Man returns for Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, with no explanation for how he survived the explosion in the previous film.
- The tagline for Crank: High Voltage is, "He was dead... but he got better."
- Death Warrant: Burke shot the Sandman multiple times in the chest from close range in the past, and he seemed to be dead. Somehow, the Sandman not only survived but Burke had never heard he'd done this until they met again two years (very unlikely, and if he did Burke's likely to have been at least the star witness in his trial, so he'd know). Not only did he survive, but apparently he's in perfect health given his very athletic battles with Burke in prison, while such injuries would probably disable a person permanently even if they'd survived. However, it also seems he's Made of Iron, as seen later when he didn't go down after getting caught on fire and had to get his head impaled on a spike to kill him.
- Possibly Escape from New York. Though there is never an explanation, nearly every time Kurt Russell's character Snake Plissken meets another character for the first time, he is greeted with "I heard you were dead." At one point, I believe he replies "I get that a lot." Apparently, Snake Plissken is both famous among the prisoners on the island of New York, and famously dead.
- In the epilogue of The Expendables, Gunner reveals to the rest of the team that Barney didn't kill him after all, averting a Shoot the Dog into a Disney Death. The surprise reveal is lampshaded by Barney right before Gunner suddenly appears in view.
- The Faculty has none other than Jon Stewart in it who gets his fingers cut off by a student, then stabbed in the eye with a pen. The pen contains a drug that dehydrates the alien that had possessed Stewart's character leaving him dead on the ground. Then, later in the movie when they finally kill the queen parasite (thus killing all the drones, freeing everyone) we see Stewart somehow got better. Despite being dead for several days in the film's timeline he survived with only a bandaged hand and an eyepatch.
- Flodder: Grandpa Flodder is killed off in the first movie, with the money he stashed away in his model trains becoming a plot point. In the third movie and the TV series, he's alive and a part of the family again without explanation.
- Friday the 13th:
- It's established in the first film that Jason Voorhees drowned as a child before the film took place. Come Part 2, however, Jason shows up alive and well as an adult, with no explanation as to how he survived the drowning, with the idea that he was a case of Never Found the Body being presented by Paul. However, Jason Lives and Jason Takes Manhattan go with the idea that Jason did indeed drown as a child and came Back from the Dead. However, it does still leave a plot hole since apparently Jason's mother had been stalking the woods for more than twenty-years and apparently never once even heard of Jason's survival?
- Friday the 13th Part III ends with Jason having an axe buried into his skull, with a clear extended shot of his body hours later just to drive it home that yes, he is dead! The next film, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter has him just get up at the morgue and start killing again like nothing happened. At this point it hadn't yet been established Jason was undead, but the only way this could make sense is that he literally came back to life.
- Similarly, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday makes no effort to explain how Jason bounced back from his toxic waste dip at the end of Jason Takes Manhattan. Nor does Jason X explain how Jason came back after being Dragged Off to Hell at the end of The Final Friday, though Freddy vs. Jason reveals that he was resurrected by Freddy Krueger.
- Barely averted in From Russia with Love. At a screening, the director's son noticed that a scene featuring the Bulgarian assassin occurred after that character was shown to be killed. As a result, Karim Bey's moment had to be cut.
- In George of the Jungle, the villain causes a guide to fall off a rope-bridge hundreds of feet into a gorge. The narrator says, "Don't worry, nobody dies in this story. They just get really big boo-boos!" Sure enough, in the next scene he's sitting at a campfire, scowling, with little criss-cross tape bandages on his face.
- Comes up again when Lyle shoots George in the face with the gun he'd thought was a gag lighter. "George really got shot, but he can't die, because let's face it, he's the hero!" Sure enough, a cut later, he's completely unharmed.
- At the climax of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, the ninja Storm Shadow is run through with a sword, then falls several stories into freezing water, in the heart of a base in the middle of the Arctic which collapses several minutes later. It looks as if he has been killed, although popular fan speculation had it that he survived somehow. In the sequel, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, it turns out that he is still alive, and was in fact considered to be at large. No other explanation is offered.
- In Godzilla (1998), mid-way through the movie, Godzilla is shot by submarine missiles in the Hudson River and apparently killed, with a shot of his body shown drifting lifelessly in the water to drive it home to the audience. However, the military must not have followed up on that, because after the protagonists destroy Godzilla's nest, he appears perfectly alive and well to the surprise of everyone. Apparently, nobody thought to look for Godzilla's body after he got shot.
- The UN Secretary-General in Godzilla: Final Wars enters with the line, "I managed to escape." He was last seen on a plane that exploded. Even funnier on one release, where a Japanese grammatical ambiguity has it mistranslated as "I must have escaped somehow."
- Dr. Sam Loomis from Halloween. In the second movie, he lights up a lighter in a room full of hydrogen to kill Michael Myers; he blows up practically the entire first floor of the hospital. However, in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, he shows up, unscathed but for a burn mark on the side of his face, and a crippled walk. It seems that the good doctor is as indestructible as the killer he goes after! In the Rob Zombie remake, Michael crushes Loomis's skull, but he returned for the sequel. You decide which one is more badass/ludicrous.
- Michael himself (who was originally just a regular ol' human). Before the explosion, Michael is blinded after Laurie shoots him in the eyes, and Michael is set ablaze in the explosion. In the fourth film, he can see just fine and has no visible burn scars. He even gets up from a decade-long coma with immediate full strength.
- Hero (1997), an insanely violent kung fu flick, sees the main, uh, hero's brother in the climax, who attempts holding the main villain at gunpoint only to be sliced in the throat (High-Pressure Blood included). The brother somehow reappears five seconds later, with nary a speck of blood on him, and quite alive enough to back up the protagonist. And then it's subverted in the final scene, with the same character, but this time dying from his injuries.
- Tommy Five-Tone at the end of Hudson Hawk:Hudson: You're supposed to be all cracked up at the bottom of the hill!
Tommy: Air bags! Can you fucking believe it?
Anna: You're supposed to be blown up into fiery chunks of flesh!
Tommy: Sprinkler system set up in the back! Can you fucking believe it?
(Beat)
Hudson: ... Yeah, that's probably what happened! - One of the most infamous lines from Jaws: The Revenge is Hoagie's "It wasn't easy!", the only explanation he offers as to how he survived being trapped in a crashed plane under attack by a shark.
- The Lemony Narrator and protagonist of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang complains about films bringing back dead characters, but, well, that's what happened with Perry, so he can't just cut it. Instead, he brings back all the dead characters in the film. And Abraham Lincoln and Elvis for that matter.
- In the 1964 Czechoslovakian satirical pseudo-western (pant pant) Lemonade Joe the eponymous main character is shot dead by the antagonist, only to turn up later without a scratch - offering as the only explanation that "Kola-Loka", the soda he has been relentlessly hawking throughout the movie (which is his job) and which is the only thing he drinks, has incredible recuperative abilities. It is taken to a whole different level when, after the three main villains get shot, all it takes to revive them is to sprinkle them with the stuff - which is then advertised as being effective "even after rigor mortis sets in".
- Elizabeth in Little Sweetheart. The character was shot twice and left for dead, face down, in the ocean, where the boat the character was shown to be seemingly fine on had to be at least five minutes away. Five minutes with a bullet in the arm and chest at age 9 followed by inhalation of seawater, is not going to just leave you with needing a band-aid.
- In National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 Becker is killed, then a few scenes later casually walks into the room. The only explanation: "I thought this was the sequel."
- Destiny appears in the car at the end despite having been shot dead a bit earlier.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- In Thor, Loki makes a suicide attempt by letting himself fall into the void, something that other Asgardians consider impossible to survive, and then reemerges in The Stinger. In Thor: The Dark World, he is Impaled with Extreme Prejudice and seemingly dies in Thor's arms, but reappears again at the end, having faked his death.note
- Black Panther (2018): T'Challa is stripped of his powers, thrown off a cliff into a icy cold river, and presumed dead. It turns out his comatose body was recovered by the neighboring tribe and placed in ice, until his family revives him with the last of the heart-shaped herb. How he survived the fall or how the ice kept him alive is not clear.
- At the end of The Matrix Neo is killed by Agent Smith in the Matrix and dies in the real world. Trinity somehow brings him back to life with a declaration of love and a True Love's Kiss.
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail has this exchange, during the witch trial scene:Sir Bedevere: How do you know she is a witch?Peasant: Well, she turned me into a newt!Sir Bedevere: A newt?Peasant:: I got better!
- Seven-year old Eric from Mystery Team claims to have been shot three times.
- Joe from Once a Thief appears to have died by crashing his car into a boat containing two thugs pursuing them, until a sudden plot twist reveals he actually faked his demise. Even though the last we see of him is a vehicle explosion he's explicitly in the middle of.
- Once Upon a Warrior has Sudigundam The Dragon getting hit in the neck by the hero Yodha's bladed boomerang and falling over, but for unknown reasons he reappears in the climax to battle Yodha again, without any signs of damage on where the blade previously struck.
- At the end of The Pink Panther Strikes Again, Dreyfus was seemingly disintegrated by his own Disintegrator Ray, yet in the next film, Revenge of the Pink Panther (as well as the subsequent films), he is back with no explanation at all. The onliest explanation is that the character was so popular, Blake Edwards just simply put him back in.
- The film's novelisation has Dreyfus, his castle, the scientist who invented the Disintegrator Ray, the UN Building (which he made vanish earlier in the film) and half a dog - don't ask - be transported to another planet far across the galaxy. Which doesn't explain how Dreyfus got back...
- In the Pirates of the Caribbean series, Captain Barbossa is miraculously alive at the end of the second film and during the third film with just the explanation that "he was only dead." Of course, being tended to by a voodoo lady who also happens to be the mortal prison of the goddess Calypso might have had something to do with it.
- In Prometheus, the main character undergoes an impromptu c-section to remove a proto-alien parasite from her, something that requires roughly six weeks of recovery in Real Life. While medical science has presumably advanced by the time of the film, it still strains Willing Suspension of Disbelief that mere minutes later she's sprinting, jumping (and landing directly on her stomach, ouch!) with little trouble. On the other hand, a punch to the stomach causes her to collapse and spend a while lying on the floor.
- The Re-Animator trilogy:
- The first film ends with Herbert West, the re-animator himself, seemingly dying after he is dragged off into the acidic mist by one re-animated corpse's guts, but he is back at the beginning of the next film with no explanation given.
- At the end of Bride of Re-Animator a mausoleum collapses on top of Herbert West, in the sequel Beyond Re-Animator West is perfectly fine and still doing his thing.
- It's implied throughout the series that Herbert micro-doses on his serum in lieu of coffee or proper sleep, which might be why he keeps coming back
- Several people in the Scary Movie series, most obviously Brenda, who in the first film was beaten to death by an angry cinema mob and visibly shown bleeding to death and collapsing only to return in the second film with no explanation, and also was literally torn to pieces and even had a funeral in the third movie, but was suddenly found on a crashed plane in the fourth which is all gloriously lampshaded for its comedic value.Cindy: Brenda, I thought you were dead.
Brenda: Oh, I thought you were dead, too! - Happens in universe in Soapdish when soap writer Whoopi Goldberg is told to bring back a character who was decapitated 10 years prior. Hilarity Ensues.
- In Star Trek: First Contact we actually get an explanation, it just makes no sense. Picard comments upon meeting the Borg Queen that she was aboard the Borg Cube that was destroyed in "The Best of Both Worlds". She chides him for thinking in "three dimensional terms". Whatever that means...
- The most popular theory regarding the Borg Queen is that she's the personification of the Collective, rather than an individual. As long as the Collective exists, in theory she will as well.
- Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker reveals that, somehow, Palpatine survived being tossed into the Death Star’s core and has returned. Oddly enough, while the movie doesn’t explain how he survived, a novel does- apparently, he transferred his consciousness to a clone just prior to dying, which somehow makes even less sense.
- In Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins, Kiga, one of the eponymous assassins gets a sword through his neck and his stomach slashed open, causing him to fall over and stop moving. At the end of the movie, he returns bearing only flesh wounds on himself and says that compared to fighting bears, swords are child's play. The movie contains hefty hints that Kiga might not be entirely human, and in an interview the director says it's up to the viewer to decide what happened.
- In Thumb Wars, as Princess Bunhead runs onto the ship despite no rescuing scene being written, she says "I escaped somehow. Let's go!"
- Invoked In-Universe in The Truman Show. Truman's father was "killed off" years earlier due to a contract dispute by his actor, but when he inexplicably returns, the producers try to explain away the incident as "amnesia".
- Wendy: Douglas dives underwater and cuts his head, disappearing. Wendy and James believe he died. Later on though Douglas reappears none the worse, with no indication how he got out or why he'd been apart from them instead of coming back.
- X-Men: Days of Future Past: If the Bad Future is supposed to be from the original timeline, and this is the same Professor X from X-Men: The Last Stand, one can assume the body double resurrection procedure worked just fine, though it isn't brought up.
