Film Appreciation - Death's Sadistic Design

Cody Hamman celebrates the 20th anniversary of Final Destination with some Film Appreciation.

Inspired by a news article about a woman who had a premonition that a flight her daughter was booked to be on was going to crash, writer Jeffrey Reddick had an idea for an episode of The X-Files that would have been about the brother of the Scully character having a premonition that convinces him and some others to get off a doomed plane... and then the people who got off the plane start dying off anyway, because they were meant to die. It was their time, and the premonition had screwed up Death's plans. Reddick didn't end up sending his X-Files script to that show's producers, though. Instead, he decided to rework it into something original - and the decision resulted in the creation of the Final Destination franchise, my favorite horror series of the last twenty years and the only one I enjoy nearly as much as the '80s franchises I grew up on.

But if Reddick's original vision for the story had made it to the screen, I wouldn't have liked it as much as the finished film. His idea was that the people who got off the plane would be driven to suicide by supernatural forces that appear to them in the image of lost loved ones. That's much darker and depressing than the movie we got. It was director James Wong and his writing partner Glen Morgan, coincidentally a duo who had worked on The X-Files, who turned Final Destination into a franchise starter with their vision of how Death would go about knocking off the characters who were supposed to die in the plane crash.

Wong and Morgan basically turned Final Destination in a slasher movie, but thankfully we don't see a scythe-wielding Grim Reaper hacking people up. Their version of Death is an invisible force that manipulates things around the characters to cause them to die in unexpected ways. The death sequences in these movies have been compared to the creations of Rube Goldberg, a cartoonist and inventor who had a knack for coming up with "complicated gadgets that perform simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways". Thus, it's very entertaining to see how elements around characters will lead to their death, and watching these things play out can also cause viewers to become more aware of their surroundings. After watching a Final Destination movie, audience members start noticing things around them that Death could use to take them out.

As a character in the film says at a memorial (quoting Marcel Proust), "We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that the hour is placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun, or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance." The Final Destination movies make the viewer realize that Death could be right around the corner, but it makes us realize this while giving us things to laugh and scream at.

It was very clever of Wong and Morgan to approach the death sequences in the way they did; those sequences are how the film earned fans, and that approach kept people coming back to see more entertaining death sequences in sequels. I love watching Death Rube Goldberg people into their graves in the Final Destination movies just like I love watching Jason Voorhees slash his way through characters in Friday the 13th movies.

The first Final Destination stars Devon Sawa as Alex Browning, and when we meet him he's preparing to catch a flight from New York to Paris for a senior trip with his French class. But as takeoff draws near, it's clear that Alex is feeling increasingly uneasy, and things like the fact that the plane's time of departure is the same as his birthday (9:25, 9/25) and a song by John Denver - who died in a plane crash - is heard playing in the airport are taken as a bad sign. Still, Alex goes through with boarding the plane as planned. And when it takes off, things go bad almost immediately. The side of the plane rips open, people are sucked out while still strapped in their seats, a fire ignites, and then the plane explodes. As flames wash over Alex's face, he snaps out of the premonition he was having to find that he is still alive and well on the plane. It's still sitting at the boarding gate, minutes away from takeoff.

Understandably, Alex freaks out. The vision of the crash seemed completely real to him, and he tries to warn everyone that the plane is going to explode. His panicked warning only results in him getting thrown off the plane, and a few other people end up leaving the plane with him. Alpha male Carter Horton (Kerr Smith) tried to confront Alex over his behavior, so he and his girlfriend Terry Chaney (Amanda Detmer) are thrown off the plane as well. The dorky Billy Hitchcock (Sean William Scott) is thrown off just because he happens to be standing in the aisle of the plane at the time. Alex's friend Tod Waggner (Chad Donella) follows him off the plane to make sure he's okay, with the encouragement of his twin brother George (Brendan Fehr), who stays behind on the plane. Teacher Valerie Lewton (Kristen Cloke), one of two teachers going on the trip with the students, stays with those who were removed from the plane because she's responsible for them. And withdrawn, artistic Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) follows Alex off the plane because she's concerned that he might be right about the plane crashing.

Those are the characters Death will end up going after for the remainder of the running time, but it's actually kind of surprising that only one person, Clear Rivers, gets off the plane because she buys into Alex's warning. If this sort of thing actually happened on a plane, I would expect more than one person to be unnerved enough to skip the flight.

Genre fans are likely to notice that a lot of the character names are references to actors and directors known for working in horror. Billy Hitchcock is the most obvious reference, the French teacher is named Larry Murnau in honor of Nosferatu director F.W. Murnau, and the names Browning, Valerie Lewton, Tod, Waggner, and Chaney are also references. I usually don't like it when horror movies have characters with tribute names like this, especially when they're really obvious ones, but it's less irksome to me here, maybe because all of these names are nods to people from the distant past.

The plane explodes just like Alex envisioned it, which catches the attention of the FBI, represented by agents Weine and Schreck (Daniel Roebuck and Roger Guenveur Smith) - whose names are also references. The agents are suspicious of Alex, but I'm glad that there isn't too much time dedicated to their investigation. They cause Alex some extra trouble and frustration, since they'll also come to suspect that he may be murdering his fellow survivors when they start turning up dead, but their presence really only amounts to a couple conversations, a little bit of humor, and some chasing.

The bulk of the film focuses on Alex as he realizes what's going on around him, that Death is coming after him, his teacher, and his surviving classmates because they truly were meant to die on the plane, and he does all he can to figure out Death's design and hopefully find a way to cheat Death and live a full life. Alex is actually able to figure out that Death is going after people in the order they would have died in the plane, and that if someone intervenes when Death is going after someone that it will skip to the next person on the list (but eventually circle back around).

Some information comes from local mortician Mr. Bludworth, played by genre icon Tony Todd, a character who has apparently learned a whole lot about Death's ways through his profession. Bludworth is creepy and returned for some of the sequels, and he has so much insight that some viewers felt he should have taken on some sort of villainous role in the franchise, but I don't agree that would be the way to go. Bludworth is just there for exposition and warnings; he's basically Final Destination's version of Crazy Ralph from Friday the 13th.

Clear isn't sure about the whole "Death has a design" thing, but she does become Alex's closest ally as he works (and fails) to keep everyone safe, which makes sense since she's the only one who listened to him about the premonition. She also becomes his love interest. Meanwhile, Lewton is terrified of him, Carter remains belligerent and antagonistic, Terry gets tired of her boyfriend being a bully, Billy is still a hapless dweeb, and Tod mourns his brother while hoping to be friends with Alex again someday, once his father (who blames Alex for George's death) has calmed down.

The hopes and concerns of most of these characters aren't going to matter for long, because Death only waits just over a month before it starts tying up loose ends by taking them out one-by-one. The first death is the least impressive, as a water leak turns a bathroom clothesline into a garrote, but they get more spectacular from there. Vehicular smash-ups, explosions, and a downed powerline are all part of the action. One of my favorite scenes comes when Carter temps fate by doing some reckless driving in his 1971 Chevy Nova with his doomed-to-die acquaintances in the car with him. It's also jaw-dropping when Lewton is the subject of massive overkill.

Final Destination is a really cool, fun movie. I had the chance to go see it on the big screen back when it was released in March of 2000 and loved it from that first viewing. I have watched it many times on home video since then, and throughout the '00s I had a good time going to see the Final Destination sequels - which, for the most part, came out on an "every three years" schedule. These movies had a simple formula, but they were (usually) clever and always entertaining, to varying degrees.

The deaths and the action got bigger and better in the follow-ups, but the original remains my favorite of the bunch. It got some really solid follow-ups, though, and I appreciate every one of them.