Amongst all the death and carnage of the Final Destination series has given us over the decade or so it has been around, the real catalyst for fear of death came from the first film. It introduced the notion that death will come for us when it is our time and there is no way to avoid it. Now I am aware that we will all die, unless we get some sort of technology that will allow us to live forever, but in this case we will die in the most Rube Goldbergian way possible and it will look utterly spectacular.
On the way to Paris with his high-school French club, Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) has a vivid premonition of the plane crashing and killing all its passengers. After Alex and some other passengers demand to be let off the flight, his premonition turns out to be true, and the jet explodes during takeoff. While the FBI is convinced that Alex was involved in some kind of foul play, the passengers who got off the flight are all dying in horrible ways, as if whoever determined that the passengers would perish is punishing those who cheated death. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
I have never viewed the Final Destination series as some sort of beacon of acting prowess. The acting has always been secondary to the visual display of carnage and visceral deaths that is the hallmark of the series. So I am not really going to touch on the flighty, manic and downright poor acting abilities of the characters on screen. They are all there as a means to move along the deaths and story, needing only the most base of emotions to convey fear and remorse and other emotions that are in horror movies. The real actor of the film is death itself, seemingly coming up with the singe most convoluted, way out there death traps ever.
If you mention Final Destination, more than likely people will only remember the death scenes and opening carnage of each of the films in the series as it sets up the elaborate deaths and Mousetrap style kills. A series of monumental events have to happen to kill one accident prone teen and each death in the movie just keeps getting more intricate than the next. It’s almost an exercise to creators to come up common objects that could pose a serious threat to the characters and it does heighten the sense of fear within the movie when you know that anything could be used to kill you. I like that sense of panic and paranoia, as death can strike at any moment and you are always looking at everything around you in a questionable way.
Final Destination is more of a guilty pleasure movie in the sense of getting to see the wacky ways death will come to the characters. The acting in the subsequent movies has gotten even worse as the creators know exactly what people go see these movies for. I am not sure what that says about us as film goers, but I do love some absurd horror movie deaths and Final Destination delivers that to us in a gory buffet. The deaths are over the top and comical at times, sometimes taking cues from cartoon style contraptions and death animations, so it is more of a watch and cringe movie. You can sit and watch this movie with a beer in hand and laugh at the absurd kills and length that death goes to get his/her kill.
