Last week, I just happened to be watching the original Final Destination film for a podcast episode, and the combination of my sick, completion-obsessed mind, and the fact that my wife absolutely loves the franchise, caused me to sit down over the course of a few days and watch the entire series. I had seen the first two films in the last year, in preparation for a recent interview with the creator/writer Jeffrey Reddick, but I hadn’t seen the third film since its theater release, and parts four and five would be brand new to me. So, join me, as I cheat death time and time again to make my way through my first complete viewing of the Final Destination franchise. Be warned, there are spoilers afoot.
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Starting off with Final Destination (2000), directed by James Wong and written by Jeffrey Reddick. Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) has a premonition that the airplane he and his French class are on will explode upon takeoff. Because of his freak out, Alex, Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), Billy (Seann William Scott), and others are escorted off the plane, and to their surprise, the plane explodes, killing all the passengers on board. Days after the crash, the survivors start to die in mysterious and extreme ways, alerting Alex that because they cheated Death’s design, it would be coming for them all in the order in which they were supposed to die on the plane.
I really enjoy the concept of these films. They are basically slashers where the slasher legitimately has no limitations and truly be defeated. The concept was originally based on the true story of a woman that got off a plane because of her mother’s bad feeling that it was going to crash, and then the plane crashed upon takeoff. Each of the intro scenes to these films is loosely based on one of these true disaster moments in history, and that’s pretty creative to me. The first film is a little wild to start off, though, as after the death of the first survivor, Death seemingly “covers it’s tracks” by slurping the water that the survivor slipped on back up into the toilet pipes. It seemed like this idea that Death was a specific entity who answered to someone didn’t really fit and was abandoned for the rest of this film and the sequels, making the deaths look more like random accidents.
Devon Sawa is nuts in this film, even if he wasn’t a completely traumatized survivor teen figuring out how to cheat death’s very specific location-based plan. He’s already got the bones of a full-fledged conspiracist who’s crazy enough to warrant the completely shoehorned in FBI subplot. Oh yeah, Tony Todd shows up too, as a way-too-into dead people mortician that gives extremely vague answers about Death’s plan. The first one has a lot of ’90s-’00s stink on it watching it 20 years later, but it’s fun stuff.
Moving on to Final Destination 2 (2003), directed by David R. Ellis. I have to say, the opening sequence of this film blew me away when I first saw the film, and still today remains the strongest and most memorable scene in the entire franchise. This film has single-handedly stopped me from driving behind logging trucks for almost 20 years. It offers the best deaths, the best effects, and the best writing of the series. Characters from the first film were killed off as well as integrated into this story, and we’re shown really the only effective way to cheat death in the entire series, which is to have new life (be killed and brought back). Tony Todd shows up again, but this time in a weird catacomb-style mortuary, to give more vague advice. My favorite kill of the series pops up in this one too, when a teen is hopped up on laughing gas and chases some pigeons, only to be completed flattened by a falling pane of window glass. Brutal!
Original film director James Wong returned for Final Destination 3 (2006), the only film in the franchise I actually saw in theaters. Mary Elizabeth Winstead took the lead role, pre-seeing the Devil Flight (whose mascot is voiced by Tony Todd) roller coaster go off the rails before it happens, saving a select few from certain death. I had a lot of problems with this one, as it kind of contradicts itself from the get-go. The entire roller coaster crash is caused by a character’s camera wrapping around a rail and obstructing the coaster wheels, while destroying an already weak brake line. However, the character with the camera gets off the coaster after the premonition, therefore the camera never wraps around the rail. Wouldn’t he have saved everyone, cheating death out of an entire coaster of lives? Ugh. Frustrated ranting aside, this one did have some cool deaths, and introduced a concept that Death was leaving clues to who would die next in a series of photos taken by the protagonist. No longer were premonitions enough, but now it seemed Death knew who would have them and leave them hints. I put this one right where it belongs, in the middle of the pack.
The Final Destination (2009) brought back David R. Ellis to direct, and sad to say, this is by far and wide the worst of the series. In a time in our cinema history when seemingly every film was trying to shoot in 3D as the new fad, this one suffered badly. Even the tagline was “Death Saved the Best For 3D.” The opening premonition scene took place at a racetrack, throwing bad CG tires and concrete blocks into the eyes of the film’s audience. There is even a scene where two of the characters are seeing a 3D movie and advertising with quotes, along the likes of “Now I am going to enjoy this 3D movie!”, before the screen explodes. I honestly couldn’t believe this wasn’t a straight-to-video release. Intros and outros were done in cheap-looking PlayStation 2 style Mortal Kombat cut scene graphics while Shinedown jammed some butt rock. I seriously felt like I was transported into a low-budget SYFY film. There were no memorable actors, and Tony Todd was nowhere to be seen. I stupidly guessed this would be the last one, being that it was called THE final destination, but alas, I saw that it more than quadrupled its budget at the box office and I lost a little faith in humanity.
Final Destination 5 (2011) was a really interesting entry into the series, and I was pleasantly surprised with some of the risks it took. Newcomer to the series Steven Quale directs, and we got a few noticeable actors, like P. J. Byrne (The Boys), David Koechner (Anchorman), and Emma Bell (The Walking Dead). Tony Todd returned for his most screen time in the franchise as well. The opening scene was probably the second best in the series, focusing on a bridge collapse, where the effects looked surprisingly convincing. Unfortunately, gratuitous 3D shots were threatening to ruin the entire scene (I really hated this era in film). The deaths were more fun than most of the other films, although some still had a lot of egregiously bad CG. A new concept was introduced in this one, as Tony Todd explains that the best way to cheat death is to take another life, and then you’d be granted that life’s years. It was a strange transition from the other film concepts to the this but made sense with finding out that the twist in this film was that it’s actually a prequel, taking place directly before the plane crash in the first film. I didn’t really see that coming, so kudos to the writing there.
So, there you have it. I survived all five films, and although it’s been 10 years since the release of the last film, Jeffrey Reddick says Final Destination 6 is on the horizon, with a possibility of release sometime in 2022. To the other survivors of the franchise, let’s talk about your favorite kills and how you rank these films. It’s important that we discuss these things in hopes to continue cheating Death’s plan.
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