The basic concept behind Final Destination is so fascinating because like all good horror movies, it touches on fears a lot of people have such as fear of flying and fear of our own immortality.
There’s always concerns about the dangers of air travel. Timing is everything and this movie just happened to be released a few years after the ValuJet Flight 592 crashed in the Florida Everglades and the TWA Flight 800 exploded over the Atlantic Ocean minutes after it left John F. Kennedy Airport. And 18 months after the movie was released, America would experience 9/11 in which four commercial passenger planes were hijacked and crashed in the World Trade Center, Pentagon and rural Pennsylvania.
While you’re more likely to be killed in a car crash on your way to the airport, there is still a huge fear of plane travel. While a lot of people are afraid of heights, I think crashing in a plane is what terrifies people more. And that’s what worries Alex Browning (Devon Sawa), a high school student going to France with his fellow students on a 10-day Spring Break trip. Alex is 17 and has never traveled by plane and the set up stokes a lot of his fears as he tries to remain calm among his fellow classmates.
It doesn’t help that the night they’re taking off a thunderstorm is brewing as the airport plays John Denver on the PA. The musician/actor had died from injuries in a single engine plane crash on Oct. 12, 1997. But as Alex and the others board his worries get worse as he has a premonition of the plane exploding on take-off, killing everyone on board.
When the knob on the food tray falls off like in his vision, Alex freaks out and tells everyone the plane will explode. Another student, Carter Horton (Kerr Smith), starts a fight with him as their teacher chaperones, Valerie Lewton (Kristen Cloke) and Howard Siegel (Fred Keating), try to intervene. Carter’s girlfriend, Terry Chaney (Amanda Detmer), also gets into the scuffle trying to calm him.
As a pilot and flight attendants remove them all, another student Billy Hitchcock (Sean William Scott), who was late boarding also gets caught in the commotion as he’s escorted off. Alex’s friend Tod Waggner (Chad Donnella) and a fellow classmate, Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), also get off. Tod went to check on his friend while Clear who is mostly the school outcast has a strange feeling as she deboards.
The pilot won’t let them back on but they manage to convince him to allow Siegel to go as there are no other teachers on board. As everyone along with airport police try to calm Alex, Billy watches as the plane takes off only to see it explode in air as the force shatters the glass in the terminal.
Alex is questioned by authorities and those that survived the explosion are questionable about him. Even Tod keeps his distance as his brother, George (Brendan Fehr), was killed along with the rest of the plane passengers. Weeks past and nothing happens until tensions rise at a memorial service.
Then, Tod slips on some leaking water in the bathroom and accidentally strangles himself on a clothes line in the shower. Police assume that Tod committed suicide but Alex received prior signs as when an owl flies to his window, he throws a magazine at it and parts get chopped up in the desk fan revealing a clip that reads “Tod.”
Alex believes that they didn’t really cheat death but just delayed it. While the movie turns into a slasher-style thriller, I think it approaches a new idea where there isn’t a real flesh-and-bone killer. This of course leads to a huge mistake that I wish the filmmakers cut in which the leaking toilet water seeps back into the toilet valve. Also, how fast would a city transit bus really drive through a business district?
This is one thing the movie fixed in its 2003 sequel which is more memorable for that log truck highway accident. It makes you wonder if you’re really meant to die in an accident or suffer a fate later. My late girlfriend suffered a vicious attack in 2016 but died in 2022 from an illness. It sucks, but we never do know when it happens. Gen. George S. Patton survived World War II only to die from injuries he sustained in a car accident on Dec. 21, 1945 three and a half months after the war officially ended.
Speaking of WWII, there was an incident when Winston Churchill took a different seat than normal while riding in a car and survived a bomb explosion. Even Adolf Hitler reportedly said that when he served during World War I, he had moved from sitting near some fellow soldiers in a trench after having a bad feeling. Moments later, a bomb exploded killing everyone where he was sitting. And then there’s Alfred G. Vanderbilt who canceled his trip on the R.M.S. Titanic only to die three years later in Lusitania sinking.
And in recent decades, both Seth MacFarlane and Mark Wahlberg, who would co-star together in the Ted movies, were both scheduled to be on flights that crashed on 9/11. MacFarlane had spent the previous night drinking and had gotten the wrong time for the flight departure. He showed up to the airport terminal gate a few minutes after the plane went to taxi to the runway. And Wahlberg had made a last minute decision to see the Toronto International Film Festival.
I’m the type of person who believes that little choices can affect other things. While this is also referred to as “The Butterfly Effect,” I think Community did a better way of showing how something simple as going downstairs to get pizzas from the delivery person can make changes. Movies like Run Lola Run and Sliding Doors have also worked on this theory.
But almost every living creature on this planet is living on borrowed time from the moment we’re born. Jeffrey Reddick, who came up with the original idea, wrote it as a spec script for The X-Files after hearing a story of a woman who was set to take a flight when she got a last-minute call from her mother telling her not to take the flight because her mother had a bad feeling. It turned out that the plane crashed. Reddick thought it was a creepy idea and wondered what if the person had intended to die on the plane.
This is nothing new. In the 1980s, two movies The Dead Zone and the lesser known Sole Survivor examined the idea if people are meant to live or die from disasters. Directed by James Wong who co-wrote the script with Reddick and Glenn Morgan, his partner from The X-Files who also produces, the movie doesn’t really insult our intelligence by thinking this is something new. It has become common in a lot of movies, TV shows and even music videos for behaviors or actions by one character to have a huge effect.
Most of the time it’s use for comedy as in The Naked Gun movies or Green Day’s “Walking Contradiction” directed by Roman Coppola which adds a comical spin on the Rube Goldberg style of accidents later in the franchise. To be honest, after the second one, the deaths became very outrageous and unintentionally comical at the same time. However, the Final Destination 5 pulled a fast one on us by (SPOILER ALERT!!) showing all the events happened prior to the events in this movie where the survivors are on the same plane set for Paris.
I heard one commenter point out the fourth movie is titled The Final Destination which if you look at it chronically, it is the final one. That’s a good play on titles and audience expectations. However, in the movie business, “Final” is never really final. There is a Final Destination: Bloodlines set to be released in May with the late Tony Todd reprising his role as William Bludworth, the owner/operator of a funeral home and he’s been featured throughout the franchise. However, both Todd and the producers have denied that Bludworth is a personification of Death.
Actually, one thing the first one focuses on that the sequels (and prequel) didn’t was how the survivors seem to represent all stages of the Kubler-Ross grief model. Tod is representative of depression and guilt as his brother died. And the same with Lewton, the other teacher who talked Seigel into going back on the plane instead of her. We see her struggling more with depression. Carter is obviously a representative of anger as he shows it toward Alex and other people. Yet, his girlfriend, Terry, seems to represent denial as she is refusing to believe anything supernatural or eerie happened with the plane explosion. Billy is bargaining as he seems to constantly worry about how much longer he really has in life to live and even asks Alex if he knows when he’ll die.
Clear, on the other hand, is acceptance. We learn later in the movie that she has been mostly abandoned by her mother and stepfather after the death of her father. Clear has lived with grief most of her life and she views the plane explosion as just one of those bad things that happen to good innocent people. George tries to assure Alex when they’re boarding the plane that since there is a young baby and a man who appears to have cerebral palsy on the flight, that a God wouldn’t harm them. This backstory to Clear probably explains why she would get off the plane as she seems the social outcast of the group.
Final Destination seems to be a welcome addition to the horror genre given the time in which it was released as slasher had a rebirth following the success of the Scream movies. Originally, the survivors were supposed to be strangers until it was rewritten to make them teenagers mostly. This actually works because young people usually have a feeling they’ll live forever or they don’t focus much on their mortality the way older people do. That’s what makes youth so enjoyable is that you mostly don’t have much worries adults do.
While the second one seems to show signs of the ludicrousness gore exploitation of the later franchise, it works on tying its plot to the first movie. And being someone who once covered a log truck rollover, I didn’t need a movie to tell me to avoid log trucks. It was only a single-vehicle accident but the logs flew out through a cornfield obliterating almost an entire acre of cornstalks.
I’m sure a log weighing about 300 pounds flying off the bed of a truck at 55-60 mph would do some major damage to a car and the poor unfortunate people to be inside.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 