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From the creative minds of “The X-Files” came a story that could have been right out of the TV show. In fact, the idea for “Final Destination” was originally a concept developed for X-Files but the writer, chose to run away with his idea and direct the film version himself, and solved the problem of the tired Slasher genre. Sure, some of the elements were the same; a group of teens gets killed one by one, but you wouldn’t see a killer in ghost face mask, a mean fisherman with a hook or even an Urban Legend copycat with an axe. Instead, this film had a villain you couldn’t see; invisible, ominous, malevolent and cunning. Eventually this villain comes for us all, but for the characters in this film, they cheated him once. But Death want’s to finish the job.
Final Destination was a great idea for a film, playing with the themes of life vs. death, chance vs. choice, and accidents vs. intent. Despite its supernatural tone, the opening events of this film were more than plausible. As it starts, we meet young Alex (Devon Sawa) heading off with his class mates on a field trip to Paris. Immediately upon arriving at the airport, Alex has a bad feeling. He can’t describe it, and even as everyone else is excited about the trip, he can’t shake the feeling something will go wrong. He starts to see and hear things, which are in fact signs from Death, that this night and this flight have been pre-determined as the deciding factor in his fate. For some unexplained reason, Alex is bestowed with the gift of premonition, and has a vision as soon as he boards the plane.
From his seat, Alex sees the plane take off, and everything seems normal to begin with. The flight starts a little bumpy, then it begins to shake violently, and Alex’s worst nightmares are realised when there is an explosion on the left side of the plane, sending a ball of fire ripping through the passenger cabin and blowing the plane up. But then, he wakes up. Back in his seat before all that began. What happened? Did he dream it? Travel through time? And why did it seem so real? In the confusion and panic, Alex runs off the plane yelling to everyone that it’s going to explode. In the scuffle, a few other students and a teacher are all removed from the plane. While the argument continues in the airport boarding lounge, the plane takes off, ascends into the night sky, and explodes. Everyone falls to the ground in terror and shock, turning their fearful eyes to Alex, who predicted exactly what just happened in front of them.
A month passes by, and the school is in attendance at a special memorial service for the students and teachers lost in the plane explosion. Ravaged with guilt and remorse, Alex is just trying to piece his life together again, but the survivors who got off the plane all have issues with him. Carter (Kerr “Dawson’s Creek” Smith) is reluctant that Alex did not save him and won’t let him forget that he is in control of his own life. Billy (Sean William Scott) thinks that Alex can now predict the future of all events and asks questions such as whether or not he will pick up the girl he’s interested in. And Clear (Ali Larder), a quiet, lonely girl is just thankful for being alive and lets Alex know that is because of him.
From here, the brilliant premise of this film kicks into gear, as Death returns to claim the lives he couldn’t have on that plane crash, and he will do it in the most devious and evil of ways. Alex’s best friend Tod (Chad Donella) is the first to go. In the bathroom at night readying himself for bed, he slips and gets his neck caught in a tie cord in the bath, which then wraps itself around his throat. He falls into the bath, where the cord proceeds to tighten itself even more, until he is strangled to death. But to the unseeing eye, this would appear as if Tod just hung himself. Alex receives a sign that Tod is in trouble, but gets to his house too late. His friend’s body is wheeled out by the coroner, with the FBI agents who interviewed Alex at the airport on the scene. They spot Alex on arrival, and watch him with suspicion.
The next day, Alex meets up with Clear to discuss an idea. What if Tod was just the first? He describes the feeling of death being all around him, all the time and needs to know what is going on. As two more deaths occur, looking just like accidents, Alex begins to unravel Death’s design. He concludes that his classmates and teacher die in the order they would have died if they stayed on the plane. Convinced he can cheat Death again, Alex will fight to the very last breath in order to live. But Death doesn’t like to be cheated a second time and comes back for Alex over and over, with more ferocity and viciousness each time.
The makers of Final Destination probably couldn’t have predicted how impacting their little film would go on to be. It was an innovative entry in the teen horror/thriller genre, establishing it’s own rules and opening the door way to endless opportunities for people to get killed, and it’s legacy continued for well over a decade, with four sequels coming out until the last entry in 2011.
Final Destination is one of just a couple of my teen movies, which continues to stay with me well into my twenties and even now in my thirties. As its subsequent sequels came out every two to three years, off to the cinema I would go, to see what new and twisted ways the filmmakers came up with to kill people. On that note, the Final Destination series is a franchise of films (like the "Saw" series) that plays with the idea of death, and the lengths people will go to in order to stay alive. Death seems so far off and distant for must of us, and we rarely tend to think about it or remind ourselves that one day, we will all die. We come to accept that when we’re young I guess, and it’s never been something I’ve feared personally. I try to just get on with my life and live it to the full. And this gets the audience to question how hard and long they would fight for their lives knowing that death was coming for them. But the problem is we never know when death will come for us. We could have an accident in the bathroom, get hit by a bus, have our house explode, get run over by a train or a barrage of other possibilities like the characters in this film experience.
Final Destination is certainly one of the more original and creative films of my teens and of it’s era, and continued to shock and entertain me in it’s follow up films, and if you’ve seen Final Destination 2, like me and everyone else, you’ve never looked at a truck carrying logs on the freeway the same way have you?
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