Final Destination – 2000 – Is death the end?

What you remember of movie isn’t necessarily always what you impression of them are when you re-watch them. I remembered this as a gruesome movie with lots of innovative deaths.  The story itself revolves around just that – death. We have a few teenagers on a flight to Paris when one of them has a premonition. He sees in a vision that the plane is gonna crash and tries to get every one of the plane. He is not believed of course. However, some of his friends get thrown of the plane with him. Moments later the plane explodes. Hence Death is cheated of their Final Destination.

There is something called survivors syndrome. It might not be the clinical word for it but it’s essentially what it is. People who survived a major disaster often gets post traumatic stress symptoms and are overwhelmed with guilt. Why did they survive? What’s so special about them? Are they really worthy of living? This in turn leads to increased suicide rates for this group of people. I think that is the true basis of the plot here.

There are of course no suicides. What happens is that the master plan of Death is disturbed and for things to be set straight Each and every one of the survivor must die. They must reach their Final Destination or the world will be in chaos. The characters learn that each of the survivors must die in the same order as they were meant to die. You could say that this is a film about karma ans destiny. You cannot escape you destiny and you cannot cheat death.

We get to follow each one of the characters and we get clues on what might happen to them. What trivial everyday things that could lead to their deaths. We could have a tea-pot leaking causing an explosion of steam. Which will lead to vibrations so that a knife is catapulted through the air and kill the victim. I’m just making this up of course but that’s basically how the film works. The deaths are designed to be both predictable and surprising at the same time. It works fine but I think the deaths are not innovating enough. They’re fairly easy to figure out.

Nevertheless, this is a final start of a film series and I will cover the other parts over the next few days as well.