The Final Destination

The first three films of the Star Wars saga serve as paradigm for the movie trilogy. Both sequels had three years to develop. What the first film started the third one finished. All of the films were box office phenomena. The cinemagoer wanted more.

In comparison the Final Destination sequels in the first trilogy also had a three year gestation period. In contrast the Final Destination sequels are merely remakes of the original. However the brand had been established and owned its market. In today’s money Final Destination 2000 made a domestic $69.4million. Final Destination 2 2003 grossed $56.8m. Final Destination 3 2006 earned $60.2m. With the trilogy over but with a robust box office New Line decided to commission part four.

The Final Destination 2009 arrived on schedule – three years after its predecessor. There was no series hiatus as such – even though the studio publicity inferred that there was. The new title alone demonstrated as much. It wasn’t so much a rebranding as a reintroduction.

No reintroduction necessary. The format, plot and layout of this fourth instalment is as carbon copied from the original as the other sequels. New Line has a cash cow and they are not going to genetically modify it. They did tinker with Shirley Walker’s original score but that wasn’t going to induce Fanboy boycotts. To wit more so than Freddy and Jason in the 80s the Final Destination sequels are product as entertainment with no camouflage of art.

The movie business is run by corporations. In this case New Line Cinema¹ is owned by Time Warner. Corporations² exists to generate profit in the same way a man cannot exist without sustenance. The difference is that when a man is sated he will stop consuming. The corporation will never stop. The product a corporation chooses to trade in (be it movies, pharmaceuticals, firearms) makes no difference. The corporation will continue to churn out product until the market is dead. This is the Hollywood ending.

The corporation is anathema to the arts: new stories are not allowed to be told; experiments are not allowed to be tested; the culture is constrained and contained. Corporate film is anti-cinema. Hollywood is simultaneously the antithesis and epitome of the horror film.

The Final Destination has no new story so it uses new technology. This series was tailor made for 3D but here at Thrill Fiction the belief is that 3D is not fit for cinema. It will be a good for gamers but it is extemporaneous in the storytelling arts. It’s a gimmick – a distraction – like smell-o-vision³.

The definition of art (for dummies) is to create something out of nothing eg a film script. It is not uncommon for the artist to create under life threatening conditions. It is common for the artist to create under restrictive conditions. The Soviet Union no longer exists but it is the corporation and not the communist party that now dictates censorship.

A Moment of Truth by Robert Capa

On the surface The Final Destination is Hollywood fast food. That’s all it was meant to be. New Line hired both the writer and the director of Final Destination 2 to make this instalment like the one they made before. Yet something happened on the way to the cinema.

In 1998 James Byrd Jr⁴ was murdered by three white racists. They beat him then chained him to their pickup truck and drove off – dragging him (subsequently his corpse) on a rural road in East Texas. Writer Eric Bress incorporated this horror into the film. In The Final Destination it is the white racist who dies by his own truck.

Martin Scorcese should be so bold.

Eric Bress succeeds in being subversive in a mainstream movie. This is the raison d’être of the writer. James Byrd’s terrorist murder lives on through The Final Destination. It serves as a reminder of the horror that exists outside of cinema. It puts a bloody thumbprint on this film series. 

The Final Destination grossed a domestic $69.3m (adjusted for inflation). The market for this franchise is not yet dead. It is thriving. It has outlasted its inspiration (Scream 1996), pretenders (Urban Legends 1998) and usurpers (Saw 2004). It shows no sign of stopping.

Final Destination 5 opens later today in the US (26^th August in the UK). It has the biggest budget yet but for reasons best known to the corporation the studio has hired a debutant feature director new to the franchise. They hired the writer responsible for the worst film of 2010. Despite the return of Tony Todd the omens are ominous.

The Final Destination is not the best film in the series. It is the most important one.

James Byrd Jr 1949-1998

“A voice was heard in Ramah,

 wailing and loud lamentation,

 Rachel weeping for her children;

 she refused to be consoled,

 because they were no more.”

– Matthew 2:18

Read more Thrill Fiction: The Wicker Man

1 New Line The Lost Tycoons Vanity Fair

2 The Corporation 2003 IMDb

3 Smell-o-Vision Wikipedia

4 James Byrd Jr CNN

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Final Destination 3

Hollywood does not save the best for the last.

Sequels adhere to the law of diminishing returns thus the end of a trilogy usually means good riddance. Final Destination 2000 was a high concept addition to the genre. The follow-up (by definition became low concept and) was formulaic but someone at New Line must have loved this franchise. The mistakes made in Scream 3 2003 and Final Destination 2 2003 were noted.

Final Destination 3 2006 did not promise its audience anything new or remarkable. In true capitalist-industrial sequel fashion it promised more of the same – only better. To this end the studio hired the original’s director James Wong (not his real name¹) and writers².

2 Wong and his writing partner Glen Morgan.

Jeffery Riddick³ conceived and co wrote Final Destination. He receives credit as creator in each instalment but has not worked on the franchise since Final Destination 2.

The story went back to beginnings to duplicate what worked in the original. A mistake in Final Destination 2 was to group together a bunch of strangers. It diminished the dramatic interaction between characters. Another error was the inclusion of a cop. His access to government computers diminished the threat. Third plot mistake was the love story subplot. It was an irritant.

Final Destination 3 returns to a bunch of school kids to whom death is an abstract concept – it only occurs to old folk and other people. The survivors all know each other but are not friends. The Final Girl and the lead boy have both lost their lovers in the curtain raiser catastrophe. They are not attracted to each other.

 “Kevin. If it wasn’t for you and Jerry being friends and me and Kerry being friends we wouldn’t have even hung out.” - Wendy

There are attempts at fine writing throughout the film: Lewis rants about his life plan: McKinley lumps Charles Manson, Osama Bin Laden and the Vice President in the same pot: Carrie’s confessing her plan to dump Jerry after graduation. These are the primal screams of youth. They are drowned by the perfunctory and pedestrian story.

With AJ Cook gawping her way through Final Destination 2 James Wong had to cast another Devon Sawa. He settled for Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

Winstead awaits the release of her biggest role to date in The Thing 2011. A perusal of her curriculum vitae reveals enough credits for Final Girl⁴ status but she’s more of a Scream Queen⁵. In Final Destination 3 she tries to inhabit the role of lead character Wendy but there is nothing involving about her performance. Even with expectations for horror acting so low Winstead is begrudgingly adequate.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead: will scream for food

Jamie Lee Curtis was a long time ago.

Some of the blame can be directed at her co star Ryan Merriman. His rendition as the lead male is as flat as a runway model’s chest. There are however flickers of bright spots. Kris Lemche as McKinley, Alexz Johnson as Erin and Sam Easton as Frankie Cheeks command the little screen time they have but the rest of the cast is anonymous. It’s that bad.

The real stars of these films are the gags: the stunts and CGI that death employs to entertain the renter. The Final Destination films have never elevated themselves to the folklore of the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. None of the Final Destination 3 gags are memorable. They entertain in the moment but fail to resonate after the credits compared to Johnny Depp’s death in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street 1984 for example. A reason for this is the preposterousness of execution.

The highly advertised roller coaster scene is over detailed. The camera is close up on the teens faces thus reminding the viewer that it is only a movie. There have been videotaped rollercoaster tragedies shown on the news. In order to induce realism the filmmakers could have mimicked that ground level angle POV long shot vérité style. In making the choices they made they removed all tension.

Tension exists when the audience doesn’t see death coming. The kill is sudden and the viewer is jolted. Tension oozes from the screen as to what will happen next. This film had one of those instances. That’s not enough for 90 minutes.

This final chapter in the trilogy was a good riddance and although Hollywood doesn’t save the best for the last Final Destination 3 was an improvement on its predecessor. It also made more money⁶. In the current production climate that meant a franchise reboot was inevitable.

Only the music industry can wring more money out of death than Hollywood.

Read more Thrill Fiction: The 100 Best Horror Films #3

1 James Wong Wikipedia

3 Jeffry Riddick IMDb

4 Final Girl AxWound – Gender in the Horror Genre

5 Scream Queen Wikipedia

6 Final Destination series The Numbers

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