As absurd as it is to believe that humans could intuit some sort of grand design, such premises are irresistible in movies, where even stinkers like Nicolas Cage’s Next can be engaging. The Final Destination series has two great premises: A) What if you could cheat Death? and B) What if by cheating Death you merely bought scant time alongside a hefty penalty? In the original Final Destination, Devon Sawa’s Alex is treated to a premonition of his impending demise, which allows him to save himself and a handful of his doomed acquaintances… initially anyway.
You would have a hard time naming many mainstream films that deal with ideas as unsettling as predeterminism—and that’s before you begin to ponder what, exactly, Death is and whether or not there’s an equal and opposite force that wanted Alex and company to live. Perhaps his premonition was merely a supernatural glitch—a bug in the cosmic code. Wisely, the series has yet to ruin its emergent questions with answers, although reports say the next installment will flesh out Tony Todd’s undertaker character, presumably because Hollywood screenwriters are allergic to mystique.
Great premises can only take you so far, but the series exhibits fine execution as well. Whenever Death’s preferred design fails, it devises Rube Goldberg levels of wildly entertaining events to correct its mistakes. The fourth film in the series, idiotically named The Final Destination, is the worst of the bunch with its SyFy levels of production value, but even it features a white supremacist getting dragged down the street by his own vehicle while somehow setting himself on fire in the process. If that’s the worst you have to offer, you’ve got yourself a solid franchise. Incidentally, my favorite Final Destination is the most recent entry despite some rather stupid character decisions, which is notable because there’s no other franchise in horror movie history that manged to save the best for last.
The formula is so novel, it holds up the weight of five films with ease. In the opening reel, our hero must find him or herself dying in a horrible accident that kills dozens if not hundreds of innocent bystanders. Moments later, the hero will wake up to find it was a bonafide premonition of the future, a future which can be changed. Unfortunately, it won’t be long before the large cast of expendable characters learn that Death will come back for them with a vengeance. What’s interesting about the formula is the filmmakers keep tweaking it with new rules that don’t conflict with the old ones.
In the first film, the principal characters learn that Death comes back for them in the order they were originally supposed to die, picking them off one by one like an invisible slasher. The second film reveals that Death, if unable to carry out its hit list forward, will work backwards (this one is the least logical Destination film because its heroine has multiple premonitions for no other reason than it’s convenient to the messy plot, but overall it may very well be the most entertaining). The third outing seems to suggest Death has at least enough consciousness to taunt its victims with photographic clues of their demises. The fourth expands the mythology in no discernible way at all, which is probably for the best considering it’s the least imaginative entry. And the fifth movie introduces the most radical expansion to the rules to date: Death will give you a pass if you willingly take someone else’s life. This leads to a boringly routine climax (a Final Destination movie really didn’t need a shootout scene), but also the most satisfying twist ending ever put to film.
Yeah, I said it. Eat your heart out, Shyamalan.
There’s a lot of silly stuff in these movies, most of it intended, which compliments the heavier implications. Nothing is more thrilling than cheating Death. Unfortunately, Death always wins in the end, it just so rarely does in the movies.
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