I understand the basic concept – a group of people avoid a deadly accident only have to death kill them one by one. What I don’t understand is how it’s executed.
At first, I assume the characters don’t see the pattern. But once they understand what’s happening, what do they do? In “man vs. nature” films like Jurassic Park or The Day After Tomorrow, the characters are at the mercy of their environment, but they still have some plan to do something: get from here to there, escape from a place, reunite with family. How can the Final Destination characters escape their fate? Where can they be safe when death will always find some way to kill them? Do they wait it out? Do they come up with some plan to do battle with escalators and car washes?
Basically, I understand the idea of fleeing or killing the murderer. I don’t understand what you do when the murderer is THE WHOLE WORLD.
I know the obvious way to get this information is to simply see the movies, but I don’t want to do that (too scary. No like).
While we’re on the subject, how is the prescient character able to see the future and avoid being killed (at first)? Is that explained? Does that character use his gift to avoid death later in the film?
BTW, this is my first thread. Longtime reader, first-time poster. Please be gentle!
To be honest,they don’t have much of a plan. Once they discover the pattern of their friends dying, they mostly panic and behave extra “carefully”, but death still gets them in the end. The whole point is that they CAN’T escape, so the sheer inevitability ratchets up the morbid tension because you know somebody’s going to get it, the question is primarily “Which one’s next?” and “In what absurdly contrived manner will they die?” And of course, the movies are full of bait-n-switch moments so they set something up that seems absolutely guaranteed to off someone, and then…“Whew! That was close!” BLAMMO!Really silly stuff, mostly, but the “fun” is seeing how people end up getting bumped off. In some cases, Rube Goldberg would be proud.
You have to consider the target audience, teens and young adults. The implication of the movies is that they are not in control of their fate, the future is not guaranteed, they may not live forever, and are not invincible.
Not exactly. From the first movie the characters find out (through researching the net for similar cases IIRC)that if Death fails to kill one of the victims in the right order he or she should have died, the chain is broken and it just stops. The first one ends with the characters finding out that Death will just skip to the next one.
In any case, the general idea in all the movies is that the characters hope that, avoiding the Rube Goldberg destined for them, they will be safe. It tends not to work.
And the fourth one has the main character daydreaming more premonitions that help him somewhat.
I guess that’s where it loses me. I’m a writer, and having the second half of Act Two boil down to “the characters hope that something happens or doesn’t happen” just sounds like weak, even awful, writing.
They hope? I mean, are they just passively waiting to be killed? Does anyone hide out in the forest or the desert or lock themselves in a basement or anything? Does anyone try to negotiate with Death – “I’ll kill the others if you spare me”? Man, I’m thinking of decent ideas after 30 seconds; the screenwriters apparently didn’t. Even during the sequels.
ghardester, I understand the target audience, but films still have to have plots. Characters act and then react to things. Stakes are raised, all seems lost, and then the heroes come up with a plan to defeat the enemy, and then they enact the plan. But it seems like in these films, there’s no plan.
To me these films come across as torture-porn lite. It’s not about will they/won’t they survive. It’s how are they gonna get killed. Every death needs to be more elaborate than the last.
That’s exactly what happens in the first one (which is really the only good one). The main character goes out and locks himself in a cabin to try and stop the chain. He only leaves when he realizes that he wasn’t the next one. You find out in the sequel that the two survivors have been cheating death for a few years, until one finally dies. The sole survivor ends up submitting herself to a mental institution so she can stay locked in a padded room.
The first movie is actually a pretty smart and funny horror movie. It was also a nice break from all the slasher movies of the 90’s. The rest of them basically just rehash the same plot over and over.
Oh, and there really was a plan in the first one. It wasn’t until the very end of the first movie that they realized “we can’t win.” Which made for a really great ending.
This is the correct answer. The point of the Final Destination movies is to watch hot teenagers die in elaborate, gory, often humorous ways. And they are awesome.
They’re basically black comedies. The formula of the movies is not in the plots (which are always the same), but in that they are clotheslines for a series of elaborate, Rube Goldberg kills.
There really is no fighting back. Sometimes the characters will try methods to take the curse off, and what not, or think it can be broken if someone dies out of order, but ultimately everybody always dies in every movie. There are never any survivors. Death always wins.
I only watched portions of the first one, but I got the idea that all of these were accidental deaths, right?
If I were writing it, I’d have the protagonist (whoever it is) and the audience think that he’s cheated death. And in the very last scene, I’d show him relieved at the end of the day, getting ready to take a shower, and the camera pans over to a closeup of the middle of his back, where there’s a really large, dark and misshapen mole . . .
I love the first movie, but I’ve only seen bits and pieces of the others.
In the movies, the protagonists don’t have these awesome precognitive powers. Take the first film: A high school class is preparing to board a plane for a field trip type thing. During the boarding the protagonist has a quick flash of the plane exploding in midair and he panics. A big fuss is made on the plane and a group of kids wind up being kicked off because of it. Lo and behold the plane explodes shortly after takeoff.
The protagonist is able to look up online what went wrong with the plane. He’s able to see in what order compartments exploded or burst into flames so he’s able to see in what order everyone was supposed to die. One by one kids start dying in that order. They manage to prevent a few deaths and they think they’re home free but the twist at the end is that preventing your death a second time doesn’t save you, it just means that death skips over you in that run.
There’s a scene at the teacher’s house (I can’t recall precisely how she died) where you see some weird mist come through her window. My interpretation: It’s death.
As Dio said, the films are mainly a vehicle for showing off really elaborate deaths. Think the SAW series, but instead of the kills happening in bleak warehouses they’re taking place in real life environments (a girl killed by frying to death inside of a tanning machine, for example).
I didn’t mean “hope” in the sense of “wishing for the best”. They gather information and then devise a plan, which at the end turns out to have been mistaken: they discover other cases and infer that preventing one convoluted death would save all. That’s way more of a plan than “let’s just run away from Jason Vorhees through the forest!”, for instance.
Granted 2, 3 and The just follow the same basic premise, maybe 2 has got the twist of having a former survivor explaining the rules, but yeah, those are at fault for being derivative. 1 is perfectly fine and logical as horror movies go.
The characters at 1 even hint at attempting to explain the prescient dream as “maybe someone sending a message”.
I’ve never seen these movies, so they may, in fact, be badly written. However, the inevitability of fate is a recurring theme in some very well written stories throughout history. It came up several times in “1001 Nights” for example. In one, a prince who is prophesied to be stabbed to death on a certain date is sent to a deserted island to escape, but is surprised to meet the hero of the story, who had just been shipwrecked there. The hero is a good guy and shows that he has no intention of killing the prince, so they become friends. On the fated day, the hero trips while handing a bread knife to his new friend, and bam! Prophesy fulfilled. Ironically, Scheherazade was telling the stories in order to dodge her own fated execution.
This is what I like about these movies. There’s no Freddy or Jason that can be killed to end the ordeal. Running into a police station isn’t going to help. I think that the unique horror of these movies it that the bogey-man cannot be killed, or even seen, as it is fate/death itself. All you can do is try to dodge death as long as possible.
YMMV
After reading said Post 10, I came back here to praise the genius that wrote it. But then I realized that you were just tooting your own horn. I can’t reward that.
They are not far off from classical fairy tales within the Brothers Grimm. Quite innocent and tragic. They prepare our children in the world as it has always been… The world of suffering and unexpected death and seperate from that great Joy. It is simply a fable of death anticipated… which, let’s face it, we all face daily.
