The Final Destination (2009)

Rated R for mostly pretty bad looking 2009 CGI death coupled with a sex scene that has completely unnecessary nudity.  Also, there are some comments about  racism that probably need further exploration.  Oh, and hey, they finally addressed how suicide works, which creates some pretty troubling imagery.  There's language throughout and bad behavior galore.  It's a well-deserved R-rating.

DIRECTOR: David R. Ellis

It's the 3D one, okay?  

I know it is going to be the thing that colors this entire blog.  I did not watch this in 3D.  I watched this on HBO Max.  So there's going to be this whole thing where I watched the film in a format that it really wasn't meant for.  There's a whole history of horror and tailoring the film to a 3D audience not reading for the 2D.  I actually have a DVD of Friday the 13th 3D with the red-and-blue glasses.  I won't even shy away from this.  I'm, oddly enough, a huge fan of 3D movies.  Less so now, but there were times when I would shell out as much as was needed to go see a movie in 3D.  Heck, I even convinced my wife to buy a 3D TV and I bought four very expensive pairs of 3D glasses to pair with that TV.  I may have used the 3D feature on our TV twice.  Yeah, I'm not proud of that moment. 

But what I'm dancing around is that The Final Destination looks bad.  Like, it looks really bad.  I don't know what it is.  I feel like adding the definite article "the" in front of a franchise film means that there's going to be something attempting prestige.  The funny thing about The Final Destination is that it definitely is the one that shies away from any form of class whatsoever.  Now, I know where my following statement is coming from.  Nick Zano, who plays Hunt, was a long-time castmember of DC's Legends of Tomorrow, a show that I watched a lot of (but never actually finished...yet).  What I was going to say was that The Final Destination feels like the CW TV adaptation of the franchise.  If you turned this into a teen drama where people died kinda gory deaths, but those deaths didn't look even remotely real, you'd have The CW's The Final Destination.  A lot of horror franchises do this.  As they realize that a franchise doesn't really matter in the later numbers and that they can probably get a bigger investment on return by cheapening up the production value, you get stuff that looks like it is completely disposable.  I'm not breaking anyone's brain here.  Is there a chance that a lot of the budget was thrown into the 3D gimmick?  Oh, absolutely.  There's a lot of CG sequences that are meant to pop out at the viewer, things that the previous movies wouldn't do.  But they don't look good.

And so much of it is based on whether or not it looks good.  I am ashamed to say it.  That's been something that has bothered me about film lately.  I hate that I'm getting to be a crotchety old man. I was reminded about the concept of the "second screen storytelling" where movies and TV have to get dumber because people are going to be distracting themselves with their phones.  The Final Destination movies are key films for second screen storytelling because they are a phenomenally low bar to understand.  Because they are so fantastically simple, you have to hold on tightly to the things that do work.  And the things that worked in the other films were how gnarly the gore was. It always bothered me that Gen Z liked the Star Wars prequel films because the "lightsaber fights were so cool."  Listen, I'm now excited that people like those movies while I don't.  I'm secretly always rooting for Hayden Christiansen and Ewan McGregor because they seem to be fighting for those films all the time.  But I don't like that I like the Final Destination movies because how cool they should look.  But when you get a movie like The Final Destination, there's nothing to hold onto.  Honestly, a character like Hunt becomes more frustrating because there is so little redeeming about the film.  

Heck, let's have a conversation about Janet, why don't we?  These characters don't make a ton of sense. There's no excuse for a character like Janet to exist.  One of the tropes of these films is the hump that it takes to get over when it comes to accepting that Death has a design.  It's part of it.  One of the tropes of a time loop movie is shorthanding re-explaining that people are in a time loop.  For Final Desintation movies, it is the notion that they are going to be killed off in order.  I'm not mad at Janet for being skeptical that she's going to die the first time.  It's an absurd premise and a lot of us would act like Janet.  But then Janet narrowly escapes her second death, thanks to George and Lori.  She should be the most devoted believer in Nick and his visions.  She went through the trauma.  She went through all of it.  It's understandable that she wants to go back to her old life. But Lori, when she gains the ability to see the signs, should have an acolyte in Janet.  When Lori starts seeing the signs, Janet fights it tooth-and-nail...over a movie.  That's it.  The stakes are "I want to see the rest of this movie."  That doesn't make any sense.  The worst case scenario would be that Janet misses the film and the two of them are put at ease that Lori's fear over what just happened was just a healthy dose of paranoia.  And I would even accept that Janet could be tired of running.  It makes little sense, but also the movie teases the notion of survival fatigue.  Maybe she has that.  The performance she gives is...not that.  Instead, Janet 180s the whole thing because the movie needed her to be a different person than she was.  I hate that so much.

One thing that kills me about a horror movie is when it breaks its own rules. This is double when they introduce something quasi-supernatural into the story.  With most genre storytelling, the audience is meant to make a logical leap.  We are asked to trust the film to tell us what can and cannot happen.  Now, loopholes are fine.  To a certain extent, The Final Destination tries playing a loophole, which I call a betrayal of trust.  One of the key concepts that repeats throughout this franchise --and The Final Destination goes out of its way to confirm --is that the survivors of the initial inciting incident must die in the same order that they do in the previous timeline.  It makes no sense and I don't get it.  (Also, I still don't get why they just don't die of natural causes, but let's ignore that.) Anyway, it's a trope that we're asked to invest in because that's the story.  When George wants to kill himself --and I am quasi grateful for peace to my nerd side that has been asking this question --he is not allowed to because the order would be messed with.  George tells the audience that he's been trying to kill himself all day and the universe won't let him.  But that order is thrown out the window at the end of the film.

The movie desperately wanted to have the "It's Here" play its way out.  The movie thinks it is being clever, but I can honestly say those words mean nothing.  It says that Nick's visions are messing with him to get to this specific spot and everything is part of Death's plan.  But that doesn't really scan, now does it.  You might think that the truck slamming into the coffee shop might technically kill them in the right order and that's fine.  I'm more talking about Nick saving all of the people at the theatre, a vision that should have Death really angry.  After all, Nick has a vision of Lori getting ground up in an escalator, but he's not just saving her.  The explosion on the construction site kills a lot of people.  But when Nick interferes, he gets nailgunned to a wall.  Now, the nailgun isn't killing him.  The rules are still working.  But Nick uses his ingenuity to use the sprinklers to stop the fire.  If Nick didn't interfere in this moment, he would be the first to die. The explosion would have gone off right next to him.  Maybe that's my whole frustration.  The movie keeps playing with the notion of what is free will and what is scripted.  Final Destination 3 also played with that notion and it's just annoying. 

This is also small, but I hated the NASCAR race.  Each of these giant set pieces are meant to be intense for the audience.  But what is also true is that they are supposed to be grounded in oddly realistic tragedy.  (I know, the highway scene in Final Destination 2 is pretty massive.) But the NASCAR sequence has screws unscrewing themselves.  If Death has a plan, these moments are supposed to happen slowly.  We don't need to have magic Death killing anyone.  Wear and tear tend to lead to Death, not the heavy finger of the Grim Reaper pushing everyone to their demise.  It's stuff like this.

There is one fun moment.  In all this complaining, I need to have one moment that brought me joy.  Boy-oh-boy, did they put the racist redneck stereotype in the movie.  I don't mind.  As the United States starts re-entering that phase where racism is the new normal, I'm not going to fight the over-the-top stereotype (although, just because people don't look like this, doesn't mean they aren't racist).  But that entire death for the racist was pretty funny.  The radio station changing to War's "Why Can't We Be Friends?" got me pretty good, especially considering that this death was maybe the only grounded effect (for the most part).  

I read that this is universally the low point in the franchise, so that gives me hope for the final two films.  I don't know if I have the time to knock out another two movies in the franchise before Halloween, but I hope to.