“Crime Scene: Avatar”
This is the new Ludwigshafen crime thriller
In their most recent case, Chief Inspector Lena Odenthal (Ulrike Folkerts, right) and colleague Johanna Stern (Lisa Bitter) have to deal with people and avatars.
© SWR/Christian Koch
In “Tatort: Avatar”, detectives Odenthal and Stern have to go into virtual worlds to solve two mysterious murders.
What is “Tatort: Avatar” about?
A dead banker is found on the banks of the Rhine. Conveniently, his smartwatch provides precise information about the time of his death, which occurred due to a heart attack. However, the traces of pepper spray in his wide-open eyes indicate an act of violence. Footage from a surveillance camera that happens to be there quickly leads the detectives to a young programmer, Julia da Borg (Bernadette Heerwagen, 46), who was supposedly just jogging at the crime scene.
Even if she doesn’t want to have seen anything, she remains particularly suspicious of Lena Odenthal from the start. A home visit reveals that she is consuming antidepressants, sleeping pills and stimulants on a large scale, which provides clues to the causes of her visibly exhausted overall condition. She also seems to be very active in online forums for finding a partner, whereby she lets a self-programmed chatbot take care of most of the initiation dialogues.
She fails to mention to the inspectors that she has not overcome the supposed accidental death of her foster daughter Sina (Ziva Marie Faske, 15) and has resurrected her as an avatar using the latest AI technology so that she can continue to communicate with her. When it does come out, she finally becomes the main suspect.
Just a little later, a second dead person turns up not far from the first crime scene, this time a stabbed carpenter from Bavaria. The fact that Julia da Borg transported him to the afterlife and was also responsible for the first death on the banks of the Rhine is revealed to the viewer after around 25 minutes. As we continue, it’s just a matter of finding out what their motivation for these actions was. In order to solve the case, Odenthal and Stern have to leave the analogue world of evidence and move into the digital world. Because this is exactly where the key to solving this seemingly incomprehensible puzzle can be found.
Is it worth turning on?
Yes. Watching this Sunday crime thriller through to the end, despite all its obvious shortcomings, requires the “Tatort” fan’s politeness towards the long-standing Ludwigsburg team members Edith Keller (secretary) and Peter Becker (criminal technician), who finally make their presence felt in the finale of the case say goodbye to your well-deserved retirement.
A little more space could have been given to the original, down-to-earth departure of these two characters, because the rest of this “cyber thriller” isn’t really convincing. This is mainly due to the fact that the script addresses major digital topics of the time, such as the possibilities of artificial intelligence, cybergrooming and identity theft on the Internet, and then presents them in a surprisingly old-fashioned and analog way.
What is also difficult to bear is the way in which the lives of the young people from the mysteriously deceased Sina’s environment are portrayed. Because this corresponds more closely to the ideas of the 69-year-old screenwriter Harald Göckeritz and the 55-year-old director Miguel Alexandre than to the much more complex and casual reality.
The young actors deliver convincing acting performances, but in too many scenes they have to carry out dialogues in front of the graffiti walls of a youth club, decked out in smart hats and lumberjack shirts, while their main interests are, of course, skateboarding, rap music and their cell phones. The use of artificial intelligence in the development of the script and the visual implementation of what was essentially a well-intentioned thing would probably not have been a bad thing.