Final Destination
Director: James Wong
Writer: Glen Morgan, James Wong, Jeffrey Reddick
Cast: Devon Sawa, Ali Larter, Kerr Smith, Kristen Cloke, Daniel Roebuck, Roger Guenveur Smith, Chad Donella, Seann William Scott, Brendan Fehr, Tony Todd
Seen on: 13.9.2024

Plot:
Alex (Devon Sawa) is getting ready to travel to Paris with his high school class. But as they seat themselves on the plane, he has a vision of the plane exploding. The commotion he causes as he tries to warn everybody leads to him and several class mates who got involved in his panic attack to be kicked off the plane. So they become witnesses instead of victims when the plane actually explodes. But their reprieve is short-lived as the survivors also start dying.

Final Destination was a kind of cult movie immediately upon release, when I saw it the first time. But I haven’t seen it since, and was curious how it would hold up. And I have to say that it is both still a good teenie slasher, and a testament to how much the genre has developed in the last 25 years.

I was a teenager when the movie came out and had a friend who was completely obsessed with Devon Sawa, so I saw this movie pretty early and despite the fact that I hadn’t really seen many horror movies until then. So, it really did leave an impression at the time, though admittedly, this impression has faded in the almost 25 years since then.

In any case, the concept is still a damn strong one. The opening on the plane is a shocking scene that still carries power even though you know that it’s coming. And the elaborate Rube-Goldberg-machine deaths are amazingly fun and creative. And they tried so hard to male-gaze-cool-girl Clear that they came out the other side and made her a sapphic wet dream. Much appreciated.

Parts of the entire thing have aged a little poorly, though, and the intuitive leaps the characters take to arrive at the explanation of what is happening to them should get their own olympic discipline. Some things felt a little forced, especially in the directing: the way they try to set up the “bad omens” is a little on the nose, the editing went a little over the top with some of the scene transitions, and the opening credit sequence is like a movie school exercise for environmental storytelling. To be fair, it does have a lot of charm because it feels so earnest, but it’s also a little ridiculous.

That might be a fair summation of the film in its entirety, though: because, while it does have a sense of humor, it feels like a film made by people who want to make a good movie, despite the fact that the horror genre is often populated with movies that are ironic, lean into the low budget limitations, or are simply cash grabs. None of this is per se bad (well the cash grab stuff might be), but I think that Final Destination’s staying power comes from the fact that, at its heart, it is serious.

Summarizing: I think it’s fair to say that it is a modern classic.