John Denver Appreciation Week: Your friend's departure shows that Death has a new design for all of you

FINAL DESTINATION

2000

Directed by James Wong

Written by Jeffrey Reddick, Glen Morgan, and James Wong

Spoilers: surprisingly moderate

Let's ask a question that I'm sure either one of us could come up with a real answer for if we pondered it, but which perhaps points to a greater truth: was there a better horror movie to come out in the decade before, or the decade after, Final Destination, itself released in the year 2000?  I'll modify that: what if we agree that the 1990s didn't really "start," as a decade, till 1992?  Like I said, I'm sure we can come up with a handful; I've already thought of several, though some would depend on your definition of "horror," and frankly that goes to the point.  The importance of Final Destination, anyway, seems hard to overstate.  Straddling the millennium and coming at the end of arguably horror's single most arid period since horror got started, it confirmed the genre's rebirth as a cultural and market force after Scream had generated more-or-less only itself and an adjacent constellation of Kevin Williamson and Kevin Williamson-like neo-slashers that scored strong contemporary box office numbers but boast of little lasting legacy.  Final Destination, on the other hand, launched a hugely successful horror film franchise—a franchise, all told, even more successful than Scream's—and, despite its textbook example of sequel decay, it's hard to hate even the bad entries, and most everybody remains fond of its whole phenomenon.  And though I condemn its antecedents, of course Final Destination is a derived form of the Kevin Williamson-like neo-slasher with The WB inflections, even if it didn't start out that way—through every step of development till its ultimate one, it was about adult characters, but who the hell do you think watches horror movies, asked New Line Cinema (who would certainly know), and so a neo-dead teenager movie it was, albeit one with a very different approach to "the killer."

And since, twenty-six years later, it could only be annoying to try building up to what that approach is, let's not: as we assuredly both know, the killer of the Final Destination series is Death itself, the very abstract concept, Death being in every instance (now totaling six with its 2025 relaunch) infuriated by the continued existence of a clutch of survivors from a disaster that was supposed to claim them, but lived thanks to one of their number experiencing a panicky premonition and managing to rescue a number of intended victims, sufficient to provide a slate of kills for a slasher-style gorefest, but still manageable enough for a tight, approximately 90-minute narrative.  Of course it's no trivial thing to cheat Death, for it is a cosmic force, and the entire universe bends to its design; thus, when you live when you were meant to die (the franchise has not, to date, entirely explained where those countervailing visions come from, but please do not infer that I'm asking it to), Death returns to finish the job.  Obviously, this is one really, spectacularly good concept, one of the all-timers; and it translates uniquely well to visual storytelling in the particulars of how the Final Destinations go about it, the films being spectacles in the literal (even pejorative!) sense, for Death, formless but everywhere, and virtually omnipotent in the small things, stalks its erstwhile victims with, essentially, just the stuff of life itself—"killing" with freak accidents that bear the imprimatur of a supernatural agency, with all their flamboyance, their often-staggering complexity, and, almost-as-frequently, their sheer sneering attitude.  Yet, fundamentally, they're accidents that could happen to anybody.

It's certainly food for thought, and pretty thematically flavorful (if perhaps not always thematically nutritious), gesturing at a whole bunch of ideas—survivor's guilt, compulsive thoughts along catastrophizing lines about how theoretically safe activities are actually horribly dangerous, the gnawing suspicion that existence is predetermined and meaningless, even, in its premonitions, the slippery mystery of how human reason interprets the not-so-reasonable world around it—though most thoroughgoingly, it's "about" how life is unavoidably haunted by death; the struggle is all, even if you're never going to win, which brings us, cozily enough, right back into the ambit of the classical slasher film.  And so you have here one of the two most important evolutions of the genre in the 00s, the Final Destinations starting in 2000 and the Saws in 2004, the former concerned with purifying the genre's chief theme, and hence spending all day inside wondering how and when Death is finally going to get you, while the latter is all about a motivational coach kicking the holy hell out of you till you either die or agree to seize the day and value life for what it is, which is neatly complementary.

Concluding our general musings, then, one more reason to love the series is that, with Scream having convinced studios to boost horror movies' budgets (though this first one comes in at a frugal-by-our-standards $23 million), the Final Destinations have access to a brawn that no other slasher franchise could—exploding airplanes? multi-car pile-ups? rollercoasters flying? that's no actioner, that's any given Final Destination film's prologue—so as long as I'm just gushing bullshit, I've also always found it incredibly tantalizing that, historically, the slasher arose at precisely the moment that disaster movies died, with such a smoothness of transition between the likes of The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno to Halloween and Friday the 13th that I really want there to be a connection even if I have no evidence that there is one beyond my perception that they serve the same purpose.  (My best hypothesis is that the demographic that grew up on disaster films aged into slashers, but it's not very testable.)  The Final Destinations clearly must have the same perception about purpose, though, for they merge disaster cinema and the slasher in a most natural pairing.

As for the film that kicked it all off, it famously began as a spec script called "Flight 180" which New Line gofer Jeffrey Reddick had written for The X-Files, though I don't think that script's content could be so famous as the story around it, because otherwise you'd see more people discussing how mediocre it is.  At a minimum it needed a polish to get the cringe out, while it seems gratingly presumptuous for a script written by someone outside the actual X-Files writers' room (most saliently, the prophetic figure would've been Scully's brother, positing genetic psychic powers for Scully too).  It's also not really the Final Destination concept yet: it gets as far as the disaster and the missed deaths, but its Death (admittedly, more easily-realizable within TV constraints) would be succinctly described as a body-snatching angel.  Moreover, The X-Files version, obviously, must tell its story from the outside, and I don't think it's debatable whether that's better.  (Given that the spec script was twisted inside out—really, rebuilt from its inspiration up—you wouldn't expect there to be any vestige of its origins, so I have to assume they deliberately put one back in, with Final Destination armed with its own pair of FBI agents (Daniel Roebuck and Roger Guenveur Smith), who don't much impact "the plot," but have the salutary effect of being one more pressurizing factor, and while neither of them are raving lunatics, hey, at least one of 'em is spooky.)  Regardless, it never even made it to The X-Files' slush pile: colleagues at New Line, recognizing even in its incomplete form an amazing idea, encouraged Reddick to turn it into an original feature; he did; and in a coincidence worthy of any Final Destination, it was rewritten by James Wong and Glen Morgan—of The X-Files—and directed by Wong.

So let's meet our clairvoyant, Alex (Devon Sawa), heading off to Paris for his senior trip aboard a certain Flight 180 along with his horny best friend Tod (Chad E. Donella), rage-prone Carter (Kerr Smith), Carter's girlfriend Terry (Amanda Detmer), doof Billy (Seann William Scott), Jane Lane-type alt-girl Clear (Ali Larter), and schoolteacher chaperone Ms. Lewton (Kristen Cloke); and because it is the law of writing about Final Destination, let us acknowledge that these people have surnames paying homage to horror film luminaries of yore—Browning, Hitchcock—though only by way of "Valerie Lewton," called Val, is this extremely annoying, and even then it recedes into relative unimportance before a primary character with the given name "Clear."

Well, we're getting good and primed for something bad to happen from the first frames, starting with a very 00s-codifying opening credits montage that skulks about Alex's bedroom being exceptionally stupid (a copy of Death of a Salesman is heavily-featured, because "death" is in the title, you see; a history book is opened to images of the Reign of Terror), and Wong and editor James Coblentz carry through a similar sort of hokey eerieness for the remainder of their opening, but more artfully, putting a dismal, nervous spin on the notionally normal business of taking a plane trip with your pals, getting a particular anxiety out of an old-timey mechanical flight board, while the screenplay raises this inchoate fear, once, to the level of text, when Alex notices "Rocky Mountain High" on the airport speakers and remembers that John Denver died in a plane crash.  (This occurs during a pre-flight dump that Alex has been exhorted by Tod to take in order to minimize the possibility of their bodily wastes leaving a lasting impression on the babes they've been seated next to.  Somewhere in my top three problems with this movie is that to stay in place with said babes, and enforce some socialization with them, Tod insists he has serious bladder issues and, like, what'd you just say, dude?)  Anyway, even the dump is kind of doomy, but doomier still is the seeming junkiness of the aircraft (it's a Boeing) and the turbulence attending its takeoff, culminating in the plane exploding.  Alex dies.  Alex wakes up, and details from his dream convince him it was no dream, so, taking full advantage of living before 9/11, he freaks out, getting him and all the previously-mentioned characters thrown off the plane, much to his fellows' chagrin until they witness its explosion, even being showered in shattering glass when the sound wave hits.

With the already-offered caveats, this is one near-immaculate opening, plunging us deep into paranormal mystery while serving up nice shocks to the system; the miraculous survivors are more terrified of Alex than grateful, and he's pretty shaken up himself.  But a month passes, and maybe this community could heal—except Tod dies.  It's a "suicide" except we know it's not, and, albeit with less detail, Tod foresaw this death, too.  As they get picked off in turn, it becomes harder to deny that something's finishing the job it began.  The kids—the surviving ones—belatedly realize that this force isn't anything they can fight.  Like the mortician (Tony Todd) tells them when Alex and Clear pay Tod's corpse a visit, prompting some exposition of this franchise's rules plus (sorry, it's true) a somewhat clunkily-written yet rightfully-iconic personalization-by-proxy of the Grim Reaper, you don't even want to fuck with that mack daddy.

Final Destination benefits in enormous ways, and suffers in rankling ways, from being the first in its series; it's an oddness, anyhow, that the best film in a slasher series might have none of the best kills in that series.  But there's a pervasive sense of the creators still working out what Final Destination "is," and not even getting close till the movie's already halfway through.  They've got a notion: Tod's inaugural death is, after all, quite forward-looking in some regards to the franchise house style, with the kid doing his grooming routine and the movie cycling through the more obviously deadly implements (a razor, nose hair scissors) in an exercise in kidding-on-the-square suspense, activating audience squirms before the audience (theoretically) even knows what they're squirming for, ending Tod, instead, with an unexpected accidental garrot (that, for this series, is pretty drawn-out and punishing—and prefigures its perennial CGI overreach when the "blood vessels" in his eyes, like, just explode or something while he struggles).  But so far, so great, especially for a first kill; on the other hand, it's mediated by a leaky toilet and a spreading puddle that simply feels wrong in its apparent agency, and the whole movie will attend its kills with similar haunted house theatrics, especially a gross distortion effect (it looks like a cloaked Predator) and, even more especially, an evil breeze, and you perceive they aren't quite "getting" their own concept.  Death can feel more like a vengeful ghost than the laws of physics.

The good—the great—news is that this fades: there's still too much of it, but by Val's death, they've more-or-less cracked the code, and this is the one that maybe could be a "best" Final Destination snuffing, with a whole array of moving parts Rube Goldberging (it's the cliche, but one must use the phrase) into, like I said, a very brawny stunt-and-effects sequence, eventually claiming a whole damn house, though Val herself is killed, or at least has her death confirmed, by the slasher simplicity of a knife, albeit one pushed through her chest by a series of ridiculously small coincidences that stack and stack and stack, until she's gone.  (Another fine Final Destination tradition: this is the laws of physics, but sufficiently relaxed so that, for example, a bottle of vodka is already a Molotov cocktail.)  It establishes that Final Destinations are going to be showcases for highly-disciplined editing, from the analytical way it guides us through that array of moving parts, to the way it controls our reactions and shifts between suspense and thrills and back, down to just the technical proficiency of conjuring credible cinematic reality out of Cloke already having that prop knife stuck in her chest at the beginning of a shot.  They'll do much the same thing, physics-wise, with the post-climactic epilogue—another tradition beginning—that spits you out of the movie with nihilistic contempt.  And before Val, they've already figured out how to rhythmically vary the deaths: not every kill must or should be a full setpiece; sometimes the right decision is shocking you instead, in this case just splattering Terry with a bus, demonstrating this film's black comedy bona fides and proving a point to the disbelievers still amongst our cast.

The whole movie has something like this going for it, this grim-faced goofiness, but is, depending on your temperament, the most poised of the series; it errs on the side of actual seriousness (even Terry's splattering is more-or-less serious), which is a good thing and affords Wong the ability to pivot, depending on what makes the most effective story, towards a cod-seriousness—only one entire scene is played for laughs, with Alex holed up in a shack and yammering to Death/himself while he opens scary cans with gloves to eat (carefully!) his potted meat, the safest meat, with a plastic spoon; but while these laughs are hearty, they're still bitter—or towards sincerity.  The movie is surprisingly sincere, and willing to sit with its traumatized teens for longer than you might think, especially given the grand guignol the series very quickly becomes.  (There's a willingness to soak in obvious suicidal ideation across something like half the cast.)

It's still "a slasher," but takes a page from New Line classics past, by making a slasher without murder, or nothing recognizable as murder, so that life must carry on in the midst of death, an uncanny mood which powered quite a few Nightmares On Elm Street, and Wong exploits the hell out of it.  There's a lot of thrillmaking camera direction—portentous crane shots and the like—but what struck me on this rewatch is how formally mordant it is, gray and bleak, and always either currently raining on our drearily-clad cast or just having stopped.  It's not precisely colorless (this is long before underlighting and offensive grading became ugly trends; but even then, it's mainly DP Robert MacLachlan effecting some satisfyingly-motivated "sinister" colored lighting, like at a railroad crossing), but it's leeched of vitality, altogether a fittingly "depressive" movie to reflect the emotions of a reasonably (if not out-of-this-world) good cast, who are more-or-less reacting in painfully recognizable ways to what-amounts-to-God having decided they're all going to die soon.  (The obvious weak link is Scott, one year off American Pie and playing so far off-type as a dweeby crybaby he feels incorrect.  But for a slasher, this is a Goddamn A-plus ensemble.)

I said there were enormous benefits to it being first, and to a degree that's just novelty.  But novelty gives it permission to patiently plumb the mystery laid out before it, without feeling the pressure later entries obviously would to get to the "good parts" sooner; and there's a lot of pleasure to be taken from the procedural of it, figuring out the "what" and the "why," and then figuring out how to convince anybody else of this insanity (while also not feeling the need, yet, to complicate its set-up beyond "death order," which only adds to the eldritch impersonality of its "killer," obeying truly cosmic rules that would make distinctions between the microsecond differences of victims dying in a plane crash).  So between one of the greatest horror premises ever conceived, genuinely thoughtful craft, and the sense of playful fun that isn't overwhelmed by its severity (and also, importantly, not vice versa), it's still possible that for its very real growing pains, it's not quite a masterpiece; but, you know, I'll take the risk.

Score: 10/10