Director: James Wong
Writer: Glen Morgan, James Wong, Jeffrey Reddick
Stars: Devon Sawa, Ali Larter, Kerr Smith
Synopsis: After getting a premonition about a plane crash on his school trip, Alex, a student, saves a few of his classmates. However, their situation gets complicated when death starts chasing them.
Seen through the lens of modern day movie consumption, were it to hit theaters this weekend, Final Destination would likely be a failure. It holds a 37% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a 6.7/10 composite score on IMDb and, to the tastes of the current cinematic audience, would certainly come off cornier than a cob in comparison to much of the the hyper-serious sludge that the genre has now become mechanized to spit out.
Director James Wong, who is perhaps more recognized for the infamous Dragonball Evolution than anything else these days, hasn’t directed anything since then – that was 2009. By all conceivable metrics, Final Destination stands out in the wrong ways when compared to other, similar horror efforts from the 90s; take Scream, which came out not even three years prior, as a prime example. Successful, singular and revered.
Yet, fast forward two and a half decades into the future and we’ve got five Final Destination movies, with the sixth, entitled Bloodlines, on the way this year, and to a flood of raucous excitement from what has developed into one of the most impassioned, active fanbases in the horror community. So how did we get here? Let’s go back to one word: singularity. On impact, Final Destination was able to set itself apart for the one metric that matters most for a movie’s success – the audience. The film grossed $112 million at the box office on a budget of only $23 million. Despite being in the middle of, again, the Scream renaissance, the Destination movies found a place in the fold upon release.
Take the first film’s well-known plane crash scene as a kind of case-in-point for the film’s ability to stand out. Not only is every main character involved and roped into the stakes, but the way in which Wong shoots the thing, chipped with some signature shakycam and the ultimate set-piece of a character hanging outside of a crashing, fiery plane to a chorus of screams from her fellow passengers; some from uncaring background characters attempting to deal with their own deaths, and others from her friends, struggling to cope with the fact that hers, or even theirs, might be next.
When plane comes to crash, these movies are all about death; more specifically, the unavoidable, fateful nature of it. The poster alone proves as much, shadowing the faces of each character upon it with the skull beneath their skin. What happens when you take someone’s only visible trademark of humanity away? They become a husk, and perhaps a reminder. The person that just passed is no different than you, and in the same way that they went, you will go to.
And on top of focusing solely on the inevitability of death, Final Destination offers no solace for it. Common questions about the afterlife and second hopes are abandoned here in favor of an extra stretch or stab in the exaggerated death of yet another main character. Nobody is safe (again, think Scream) and if and when somebody goes, you’ll never forget it.
To match this heightened reality the film presents the aforementioned elements, often regarded as corny or cheesy, like eclectic camera work and dramatic performances. Zooms are as common as cuts; shadows are laid on thick and sets are built only to be destroyed. The movie takes all the chaos in losing a loved one and manifests it physically and visibly in every way possible. All the anger, some of the sorrow, and none of the regret. Is it really a wonder why people latched on so quickly?
Now, the first Final Destination and its subsequent sequels don’t work for many on a stylistic level to this day, and that’s a completely fair assessment. It’s an old-ish horror movie that is certainly further over the line of aggression and commitment to concept than most of its contemporaries. But the franchise still kicking all this time later is not only a clear testament to the particular power of the original film whose anniversary we celebrate, it’s also a nod to the IP’s importance in a genre that is now commonly recognized as maybe the most milquetoast and uninventive in modern cinema.
Whether or not the sixth installment is a worthwhile watch is yet to be seen; but either way, the mere existence of Bloodlines is owed to James Wong’s timely examination of death and negative emotion that was released in the year 2000. If the fate (don’t laugh) of horror movies has hope in anything, it’s in classics like Final Destination that still guide the hearts and minds of fans and creatives to this day.
