We bounce through life, happy as larks (or glum as mudhens): falling in love, getting divorced, paying bills, spending like crazy, eating junk food, having sex, raising children, visiting the Grand Canyon, folding laundry. We do all these things, some more than others.
We also die. We have heart attacks, we’re gunshot, we succumb to cancer, we drown, we slip on the wet bathroom floor, we drive off the road. Not one of us knows the hour or the minute we’ll feel the cold blade of the grim reaper’s scythe against our skin. We live out our allotted days in a careful dance of fate.
But, what if…
What if we could step outside that space-time continuum and disrupt the chain of fate? What if we could sidestep death? What if the grim reaper reached for us and came up with nothing but a swipe of empty air?
That’s exactly what happens in Final Destination when Alex Browning (Devon Sawa), several other teens and their French trip chaperone get off a plane at the last minute because Alex is having sweat-soaked visions of the jet exploding in mid-air. While Alex and his pals squabble at the boarding gate over the stupidity of his lunatic behavior, we see the plane in the background taking off down the runway. The high school students are still arguing over missing the flight when the plane bursts into a ball of flame.
At this point, you know Final Destination will not be your typical teen horror flick. Oh sure, it’s another one of those easily-marketable films filled with teens who attend Immaculate Beauty High (most of the actors, of course, are long past graduation age). It’s also got plenty of banal horror-movie dialogue (“Death has a new design for all of you,” warns the creepy mortician [Candyman’s Tony Todd in a mercifully brief role]). And, yes, implausibilities stack up faster than bodies at Haddonfield’s morgue on Halloween night.
But Final Destination turns out to be that rare thing: an original horror film that makes smart choices at every turn. Director James Wong (TV’s X-Files and Millennium) and writers Jeffrey Reddick and Glen Morgan surprised me with plot twists, subtle visual clues (deaths are foreshadowed in images behind the opening credits) and clever puns (most of the characters are named for legendary horror movie directors). Even the final image is a jolt that made me sink my fingernails deeper into the armrest of my sofa.
In Final Destination, the action is brisk and no-nonsense. After escaping Death by a whisker, Alex and the small group of survivors from Flight 180 (which, by the way, was the movie’s original, equally ho-hum title) marvel at their good fortune while, at the same time, they mourn the loss of their classmates who were bound for Paris when the plane exploded over New York City (actual footage of the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800 is used in the movie’s newscasts).
Alex continues to have premonitions of death, clues which signal the bizarre methods in which the others start dying. One by one, the Flight 180 survivors meet untimely deaths. It seems the grim reaper is a little pissed at being cheated. Eventually, the kids—being the smart and immaculately beautiful Dawson’s Creek teens that they are—figure out a pattern to the random acts of death. At that point, it just becomes a matter of staying one step ahead of the scythed one.
To its credit, Final Destination never personifies death (besides, who could ever top Bengt Ekerot in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal?). There’s no hooded figure, no maniacally-laughing weirdo (though, I was worried about that mortician for a moment). The most we ever get is an inky, computer-generated shadow briefly darkening parts of the set. That’s Smart Choice #1.
Smart Choice #2 is the wildly inventive way in which characters die. By now, the knife in the shower is yesterday’s news and if I see one more bimbo crushed by a garage door I’m gonna scream. But how often have you watched a woman take a shard of glass in the throat from an exploding computer monitor, then moments later meet her final demise from a falling knife block? As a certain TV chef would say, “BAM! Final Destination kicks it up a notch!” At the risk of sounding like I’m glorifying violence in movies, I have to tell you that these deaths are as clever and complicated as a Rube Goldberg contraption.
Because it is so random, so circumstantial, so convoluted, the violence is all the more realistic and frightening. Freak accidents happen every day. Final Destination is a grim reminder that we never know how or when we’ll feel that icy blade against our throats. And who knows? Maybe we all sidestep death every now and then without ever knowing it…
______________________________
DVDetails
The highlight of the DVD extras is the audio commentary by director Wong, writers Morgan and Reddick and editor James Coblentz. They provide fascinating insights into the tiniest production details (for instance, the significance of the murals in the airport’s waiting lounge). Skip, however, the audio commentary by actors Devon Sawa, Kerr Smith, Kristen Kloke and Chad Donella; it’s mostly giggles and teenspeak.
There are also a few deleted scenes which include a romantic subplot between Alex and Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) and an alternate ending (Smart Choice #3 was when they left this lame-o conclusion on the cutting room floor). If you watch the featurette on how New Line test-marketed the movie, you’ll see most of those scenes anyway. By the way, the test-market featurette is a must-see for anyone who’s interested in how Hollywood shapes stories toward target audiences.
Other extras include:
· a short documentary on a real-life psychic (no, not Dionne Warwick)
· a couple of “take-this-quiz” games
· an isolated music score with commentary by composer Shirley Walker
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.