I’ve been saying for years that franchise movies don’t respect the idea of really and truly meeting your maker…the inevitable, inescapable reality of existence vaporizing like that…a sudden gasp and then nothing…the spirit rising one way or another…no dodging or putting it off.

Which is precisely what big-budget bullshit movies do time and again — they dodge, delay, sidestep or otherwise ignore the grim reaper because they want to keep reaping those Joe and Jane Popcorn dollars so forget all that biological end-of-the-road stuff. Fuck finality.

The “death” of Daniel Craig‘s 007 four years ago was, of course, bullshit — a symbolic gesture for the #MeToo crowd to momentarily savor, and then forget soon after. The Ballerina return of Keanu Reeves‘ John Wick, despite having bought the farm two years ago in John Wick 4: Even More Bullshit, meant nothing one way or the other.

And it’s all basically the fault of the nihilistically-inclined John Carpenter…Carpenter of the late ’70s was the first disser and disrespecter of death, and the idea of a character (male or female, hero or villain) breathing his or her last hasn’t been the same since.

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman: “In movies, you can trace the trend of what we might call Death Lite back to the moment in 1978 that established the if-it-makes-money-bring-it-back paradigm: the ‘death’ of Michael Myers at the end of Halloween.

“He gets shot six times and falls off a balcony, lying on the ground, joining the ranks of half a century’s worth of movie monsters who are destroyed by the forces of good. Seconds later, though, he is gone; his body has vanished. In essence, that one moment set up the entire arbitrary nature of movie sequel culture. You can draw a direct line from the return of Michael Myers to the resurrection of John Wick, all done in the name of fan service.

“But why does it feel like all this ritual undercutting of killing is killing us? You might say: What’s so bad, really, about taking characters who are this beloved and bringing them back to life?

“In a sense, nothing. Yet the subtle cumulative effect of it has been to create the sensation that a movie no longer has a true beginning and end, that it lacks what the Greeks called the dramatic unity of action. In Old Hollywood, movies had that; in the New Hollywood of the ’70s, they had it as well. But the death-that-isn’t-really-death syndrome feeds the perception that movies are now, more and more, just a perpetual blob of time-killing, with nothing at stake.

“And that has an insidious way of sanding down the inner morality of pop culture, and maybe of our society. In fact, I’d argue that all this ‘miraculous’ resurrection has begun to raise the question: If death in the movies is no longer permanent, if it no longer means anything, then does anything mean anything?”