Final Destination (2000)

Rated R, because this franchise is all about finding the gnarliest ways to kill off characters.  Rather than necessarily scare, the goal is for "gross".  It's not quite body horror because often, the deaths are fairly quick.  It is, however, quite upsetting.  I would also like to add that this movie decides to have its protagonist look at an inapprpriate magazine, absolutely deflating the romance of a scene.  Couple that with drinking, swearing, and other things that horror movies aimed at teens get up to, this is a well-deserved R rating.

DIRECTOR:  James Wong

I'm so stupid for doing this.  Honestly, this might be the dumbest undertaking that I've had yet when it comes to this blog.  Usually, during October, I try to knock out an entire franchise of a horror movie.  When I saw that all the Final Destination movies were dropped on HBO Max, I thought, "That'd probably be a good time."  That's not the mistake I made.  I'm fairly convinced that I'm going to have a good time knocking these movies out, especially considering that I am not doing Saw again.  

But the big problem is...these movies are the same movie over and over again.  While there may be similarities between films in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise or the Friday the 13th movies, there at least are respective plots that are more heavily emphasized between films.  As far as I remember, the only difference between most of the Final Destination movies is the actual deaths.  Heck, I can get even more frustrated than simply the fact that these are six movies where I have to write six essays, all fundamentally about the same thing.  To make matters worse, these movies are barely movies.  

That sounds like I hate what I'm watching.  I haven't gotten there yet.  I'm sure a couple movies in, I'm going to get incredibly frustrated with the fact that I'm not being challenged in any meaningful way.  But the bigger issue is that this is almost a fictionalized version of Faces of Death.  For those who didn't grow up in the exact era that I did, Faces of Death was something that was whispered about in the more sketchy horror communities.  These were VHS tapes that were passed around that claimed (sometimes falsely; sometimes not) to be filmed and recorded moments of people being killed on camera.  It was always something that I found too barbaric and inhuman to ever land on my radar.  Instead, Final Destination offered a softer version of this.  Instead of watching real people die real deaths, they presented "what cool ways could we have our characters die that you know are fake.  Ultimately, what this did in my head was give special effects artists challenges to up the ante from what previous movies had offered.  After all, the thing that we all remember from Final Destination 2 is the logging truck. The fact that I see memes today saying that people won't drive behind one of these trucks is a testament to the challenge that these special effects artists ascribed to.

So the masochistic challenge that I'm responsible is attempting to write blog entries with the hope of finding some nugget to explore per blog.  I don't think I'm going to win.  Honestly, I won't feel bad for even the most devoted reader of the blog on bouncing somewhere later down the line.  This blog has always been something as a hobby for me more than something that would ever garner me readership.  (Although, if I gained readership, I wouldn't hate that either.) For all I know, I'm going to have this great epiphany movie-to-movie and have something new to say each time.  Heck, for all I realize, these movies might have something different to say between films, although I'm not exactly placing bets on that idea. 

I love that Final Destination was made in the year 2000.  I don't know if a year could ever encapsulate a specific feeling when it came to horror movies.  This is during the glory days of New Line Cinema.  New Line, from today's perspective, is just the house of Lord of the Rings.  That's not a bad place to be.  But in 2000, so many movies started with the New Line Cinema logo.  New Line was, in some ways, the alternative to Dimension Films and their very millennial-centric brand of horror.  I won't lie.  This is my favorite era of horror.  Part of that probably comes from nostalgia.  I discovered horror in this era and couldn't get enough of --what was then --contemporary horror.  Looking back on this movie 25 years later, I can't believe what a time capsule the first Final Destination was.  

I mean, this is a pre-9/11 movie about a plane explosion.  This is a timeline that doesn't really exist.  Most of our pre-9/11 narratives are people who dress up fancy, smoke on the plane, and experience almost nothing at the airport.  The closest other movie that I can find to this specific moment in time is Home Alone.  But this is a story about the fear of planes.  Alex's entire characterization hangs on the notion that he could be imagining all of this.  So we have this "See something, say something" attitude wired through the film and 9/11 hasn't happened yet.  It's odd to think that this story could exist before 9/11 and would actually work better post-9/11.  It's like all of these pieces were in place for America's narrative to be that airplanes are the most dangerous place you could possibly be. 

But even beyond the moment that shaped America for the 21st Century, the DNA of this film screams 2000.  When I saw those opening credits, it was both a Who's Who of my childhood coupled with a bit of "Whatever happened to them?"  The most shocking of these was Sean William Scott, who plays the most reserved part he might ever play.  I really like Sean William Scott.  I can't say that I'm a fan, but the dude brought a certain energy to a lot of the roles he performed.  Watching him play what might be characterized as cannon fodder for death is a weird moment.  My mind goes to the same place as seeing Christian Slater in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.  There's just something very startling about seeing that kind of role.  But between Devon Sawa, Ali Larter, Tony Todd, and Daniel Roebuck, it's really weird knowing that this was the 2000s All Star Game.  The funny thing about it all is that there's also a very specific performance style that has aged poorly.  I don't think I could advertise Final Destination as a great movie, even if I had loved it, simply by the weak-energy performances that we get with this film.  My apologies to Devon Sawa.  As normal, I don't like crapping on performances because someone worked on that role hard.  Also, I Googled it and I'm the only person who thinks that Sawa is weak in that role.  But I think it might be the product of its day as opposed to anything that Sawa is doing fundamentally wrong.

The odd thing about Final Destination is that I'm almost confused about who Death is as a character.  I have to call Death an unseen character in these movies because Death has a personality.  But despite that personality, there are things that just don't make sense to me. Maybe future movies will enlighten me about who Death is.  The central conceit is that Death has a plan.  If you can see the plan, you can delay your own demise.  Okay, I can live with that.  For one, Death is incredibly petty.  Part of it comes from the fact that Death comes for us all and that plan is important to the framing of the universe.  Okay.  But these rules are a bit silly.  Death has to kill in the order that people would have died in the original timeline.  It seems like that is kind of arbitrary.  Like, if a survivor got incredibly reckless and died out of order, fearing that there would be a more painful death down the line, would that affect how things worked?  I mean, Carter almost teases that.  

But even beyond that, what about how Death is killing people?  The obvious question is "Why not let people die of natural causes?"  Like, why not just stop someone's heart?  An aneurysm would solve a lot of problems?  It feels like Death is mugging for the camera with these movies, forcing these elaborate Rube-Goldberg styled deathtraps.  That's why people start escaping is because these deaths have to be incredibly elaborate.  But that also spirals into some questions?  Tod's death straight up confuses me.  Besides the fact that the toilet leaks gel, not water (maybe a cleaning product in the basin?), Death cleans up after itself.  If Death is not someone to be messed with, why hide the crime?  I had a conversation with Henson about it.  The movie really wanted Alex to be on his back foot, running away from the FBI who are investigating Alex and his relationships to these new deaths.  But Death has no reason to really frame Alex.  I'm really trying, but the notion that Alex is always playing with a disadvantage.  But it wouldn't actually affect the movie because it would take a minute to figure out how Death worked.  Honestly, Alex isn't even privy to the notion of "Death has a design" until he meets Tony Todd's mortician.  That whole, "On the run from Johnny Law" is fun, but we don't really need a mistaken suicide from Tod to explain any of that.  It seems like a hat on a hat that is never really explained.

What's really weird about this franchise is that a lot of the hobbling that this franchise does comes from a fun tag at the end.  Why I never really got into these movies beyond either parts 2 or 3 comes from the fact that we know that Death is inescapable.  The fact that there's no hope for these characters is kind of defeatist.  I mean, it secures a universal theme about how Death gets us all in the end.  But if you are rooting for characters to make it out of the horror movie, that tag that it all circles back means that there really isn't any hope for the characters at all.  It kind of makes a movie...not a movie?  It's just survive for a few minutes long. The movie just ends when it ends.  There's no real structure because nothing they do really matters.  

But that might be something to discuss next time.