Naughts From the Aughts: Final Destination (2000)
Concise warnings about underwhelming films from the 2000s
Author’s Note: I love writing about movies and plan to keep revisiting more 2000s gems like Lord of War, American Psycho, and Motorcycle Diaries (and lots more!) soon. Mining for nostalgia is not without risks. Sometimes rewatching a film reveals just how poorly it has aged. This new series will roast films that are worse than I remembered them. Consider yourself warned.
For Tonio
Few sounds unnerve me like the echoey chords of the The X-Files intro music. It reliably sends a shiver down my spine. Creepy episodes like “Teliko,” “Unruhe,” and “The Host” have haunted me since they wriggled into my brain around age seven.
True fans know that The X-Files contributed much more to pop culture than a few eerie episodes of TV. It revitalized interest in sci-fi and the paranormal, inspiring a cult following to insist that “The Truth is Out There.” It launched the illustrious careers of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, whose award-winning work spans genres and decades, from Californication to The Crown. Maybe the best thing The-X Files did was hone the writing skills of Vince Gilligan, who went on to create Breaking Bad, one of the most tightly written, engrossing, and beloved TV shows of all time.
Not all of The X-File’s creative offspring was this high brow or beloved. Case in point: Final Destination, one of the horror movies of all time.
While writing for The X-Files, Jeffrey Reddick saw a news story about a woman who had a bad feeling about a flight her mom was about to take, advising her to switch flights at the last minute. The mom heeded her warning and the original flight crashed. Certifiably spooked, Reddick wrote an episode about a character narrowly escaping death, only to have death vengefully pursue them afterward. It never got made. Still, Reddick sensed he had something worth developing and worked with colleagues Glen Morgan and James Wong to turn his rejected episode into a screenplay.
In true X-Files fashion, it starts with a unique and chilling premise:
Alex Browning, the world’s most anxious flyer, is supposed to go to Paris with his high school class but has a premonition about the plane exploding just before takeoff. He exits the plane along with a few buddies, and shortly after, the plane explodes in midair. After the survivors of the crash start dying in a series of bizarre accidents, Alex begins to suspect that death is pursuing them. He must to decipher death’s plan and save them all before it’s too late.
What sets Final Destination apart is its unique villain— or lack thereof. Death pursues these unfortunate teens not as a masked or hooded stalker, but as an inevitable omnipresent force. This concept could have triumphed as a modern-day depiction of the grim reaper, an unsettling parable about fate, mortality, and free will. Instead, like one of its victims, this movie repeatedly and improbably stumbles until crashing into some inconveniently placed furniture.
What most people remember about this franchise are the deadly set pieces that resemble sinister yet silly Rube Goldberg machines: a trickle of water sparks a fuse, starting a fire, which scares a possum that knocks over a broom, that pops a balloon, culminating in a vapid blonde getting impaled by a narwhal during a freak aquarium accident.
However the spooky skeleton of the first film is somehow worse: short bursts of bad luck and ridiculous coincidence that are more comical and absurd than horrific. One teen, whose name I can’t remember, just walks in front of a bus doing 80 down a residential street and gets offed like one of the plastics in Mean Girls. To add suspense to these clumsy contrivances, the film begins to lean heavily on eerie music. Yet undermining these ominous build ups are odd creative choices. In this movie, all evil events are preceded by a light breeze and John Denver playing on the stereo.
There’s also a lot of bad 2000s bro movie filler to wade through. One of the most horrific moments in the first act was listening to a male protagonist refer to pooping as “torquing a wicked cable.” Sean William Scott aka Stifler is also present. Let’s just say the shard of metal that leaps off of some train tracks to decapitate him gives a more three dimensional performance than he does.
Ali Larter is the most fun to watch, though she’d be easier to take seriously if her character’s name, Clear Rivers, didn’t sound like an EPA initiative. There’s also a bumbling FBI guy named Agent Shreck, which is unintentionally hilarious given the green ogre whose franchise is more fondly remembered than this one.
Despite being as flawed and clumsy as its protagonists, this movie still made over $100 million on a budget of $23 million, launching a six movie franchise that endured until 2011.
There were some high points, like Ali Larter’s return in the second film. The most lasting legacy of that movie and the entire franchise may be the grisly car wreck that made me and thousands of anxious millennials terrified to drive behind trucks hauling logs. Yet the quality drops as precipitously and fatally as those logs after the second film.
Things became more outrageous than scary. The kills got increasingly more complicated and laughable. Like the Saw franchise, what started as a tidy premise became a sprawling, bloated, and convoluted landscape that was hard to understand, much less love.
Don’t watch this movie. Run.
Run if you feel a light breeze.
Run if you hear John Denver.
Run because, while death comes for us all, getting cardio is proven to help with longevity. The same can’t be said for watching this movie.
The truth is out there:
Death is inevitable.
Cinematic underwhelm doesn’t have to be.