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The Münster team bowling together: They only wanted to shoot a comedy!
Photo: WDR
Enraged people in aluminum hats and Viking costume marched on the streets of Münster and chanted: »Resistance!«.
The troupe looks like a typical lateral thinker demo of 2021 protesting against an alleged corona dictatorship.
Meanwhile, a deepfake video is circulating on the Internet, showing the still reigning Chancellor Angela Merkel at a conference surrounded by lizard aliens.
And right at the beginning of this "crime scene", an assassin with an explosive belt storms onto the roof of the police headquarters and yells: "Starting today, the Awakened people will fight back." Then a cute dog jumps on the man and pushes him off the roof, causing him to die hits the earth.
oops
Problematic things are joked away
The new Münster "crime scene" deals with dangerous swaggering and social divisions, and he does it in his own way: brute and point-fixed.
I don't want to be a spoilsport and generally condemn the hey-hey-humor that is cultivated in the TV area - but how it is now used to spoil a real dangerous phenomenon of our day is highly problematic.
Because those responsible take up this phenomenon with a certain seriousness in order to then joke about it.
After the murder of an IT specialist, Boerne (Jan Josef Liefers) and Thiel (Axel Prahl) are confronted with conspiracy mystics who have radicalized themselves in a chat group called Sisuntus (you are among us).
Believing they are being subjugated by secret forces, they plot a coup in a bowling center.
Soon the investigators are dealing with all the madness that the Schwurbler scene has to offer: theories about UFOs that are said to have landed on earth decades ago.
A messenger service reminiscent of Telegram.
Preppers who implant chips under their skin.
Insisting on relevance while being bombarded at the same time
On the one hand, all of this is presented in the succinct Holla-hasn't-the-world-gone-crazy tone of voice; on the other hand, screenwriter Astrid Ströher and director Sven Halfar trace different biographies of radicalization in the course of the investigation.
This insistence on relevance while being bombarded at the same time is what makes this »crime scene« so difficult to bear.
This has nothing to do with the fact that the world has completely different problems at the moment.
How could those responsible for »Tatort« have known at the time of shooting that the world situation was deteriorating so dramatically.
But what they did know: Shortly before shooting, there was a massive argument about the #allesdichtmachen campaign, in which Jan Josef Liefers and other filmmakers made fun of the government’s corona management and the media’s alleged “propaganda”.
I actually never wanted to mention this action again in connection with a Liefers appearance in a Münster "crime scene", since I consider his participation in the unsuccessful activist satire to be his private affair, which does not detract from his often very successful comedic Boerne appearances.
You don't have to be a great thinker to be a talented actor.
Anything but #shutdown
But what seems really strange: how you manage to erase the topic of Corona from the plot and setting so consistently in a film that tells so comprehensively about a protest movement that is being driven by Corona.
As if one wanted to avoid all associations with #closing everything.
The hashtag campaign started at the end of April 2021, and shooting for the "Tatort" episode began in early September.
Of course, I don't expect the "crime scene" to refer specifically to #allesdichtmachen, but how is it possible to delete all political and pandemic implications from a crime novel that was written in 2021, for which the topics of radicalization and conspiracy theories were deliberately chosen? is beyond me.
The reference to it that the whole thing should only be a comedy doesn't help either.
Especially since even larger political contexts are opened up in this comedy.
In the course of the action, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution pushes its way into the Schurbler murder case: Two androgynous clone-like figures named "Example" and "Mann" try to take over the investigation and apparently work for a kind of surveillance state.
A little joke, a little paranoia, murmurs and smiles are balanced here as well.
It's really hard to smile this time.
Even as a pure comedy, this great world conspiracy stupidity is a failure.
Boerne says it himself about colleague Thiel to his short assistant in a very unfunny moment: "Be careful, Alberich, Thiel's jokes fly so low today that even you have to duck."
Rating:
1 out of 10 points.
»Crime scene: Propheteus«,
Sunday, 8:15 p.m., Das Erste
