Who would have thought that a spec script for The X-Files TV show could launch one of the bigger horror franchises in recent years? Apparently, someone at New Line Cinema did and the result is lots of dead people by way of some rather bizarre methods. After four movies (and a fifth with Emma Bell! coming soon), no one goes to see a Final Destination movie for the characters or the acting. We go to see how morbid writers can concoct a way for someone to die. But it wasn’t always that way.
According to the DVD commentary, Final Destination (originally titled Flight 180) was written with adult characters but changed to teenagers after the rampant popularity of the Scream series and all of its successful copycats. It is a shame then that the original FD is lumped in with the likes of other teen-based horror (or as Roger Ebert calls them: Dead Teenager films) as co-writer and director James Wong and writers Jeffrey Reddick and Glen Morgan create a tale that may feature young adults getting dead, but one that has more promise than your average I Know What You Did Last Summer sequel.
If you’ve ever seen any of the films, you should know the story since it seems to get brought up every single time. Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) seems to be a slightly neurotic kid anyway. He has a premonition of the plane he and many others are on blowing up. He freaks out. Seven people get tossed from the plane. The plane explodes, killing everyone on board. This is not the film to watch before taking a long, cross-Atlantic flight. With the same series copying the basic gist so often, it is easy to forget just how effective the opening scenes were when I saw them in theaters eleven years ago. Unlike some of the later sequels, Alex’s tension is effectively built-up, not just thrust upon the character in a random foreshadow-y way.
After the debris settles and the survivors go home, Death comes knocking at their door in the order in which they would have been received. Alex and the apparent love interest Clear Rivers (yep, real character name played by Ali Larter) find out that Death cannot be escaped, only temporarily sidestepped. The rest of the movie features the remaining characters killed in oddly complex ways, but nowhere near the chinanery that is pulled out in the next few movies. The deaths are pretty impressive from an effects standpoint but are as simple as death by a falling sign or flying shrapnel. Nothing too Rube Goldberg-ian yet.
The most impressive part of this movie is the characters: specifically that they are almost real characters, not simply one-dimensional “teenagers” peppered throughout the movie for the purpose of upping the death count. The story largely facilitates this as we have a good fifteen minutes or so for the characters to “bond” or at least interact before the shit hits the fan. Even though we never really know why Carter (Kerr Smith) is such a dick to Billy Hitchcock (Seann William Scott) or why Clear is such a weirdo loner, the characters click enough to never really make those questions stand out.
Perhaps it can be chalked up to this being Wong’s feature film debut, but his direction, specifically his shot choices, were quite bizarre. There is hardly a scene in the film that does not have the camera dramatically panning or attached to a crane and it becomes tiresome quickly. Even while seeing this in theaters before I even realized such things, I was bothered by the sheer number of overly-artsy shots employed here. But, that is easy to forgive, as FD is an all-around solid horror film even if the blood and gore quotient would be dramatically increased in later installments.
It may have been molded similar to other interchangeable teen horror flicks but Final Destination was a bold experiment in the genre that shows one does not have to see the main villain to be effected by it. Combine the largely effective characters with a good story and excellent music by composer Shirley Walker and you have a worthy film, even if New Line/Warner seems to want to kill any goodwill that entails.
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