Which is still crap writing, if my understanding of the story is correct. The characters in a story making a mistake doesn’t matter unless the mistake has some consequence.
They think they find a way out, then they find out there’s no way to escape, they die.
They find out right at the start there’s no way to escape, they die.
Usually the point of horror or a “Grim” fairy tale is to make the audience feel safe.
Yes, I said safe.
The terror gets defeated. We know how to defeat Jason, don’t fuck or take drugs. Don’t invite the vampire into your house dumbass. Don’t fall asleep! Keep watching the skies!
The OP makes a good observation about these films because there is no escape. I already know there is no escape from death. I don’t need to spend $9.50 to feel that. I need to see a way to win.
The writing doesn’t matter, though. These moves are not stories, they are collections of elaborate, Rube Goldberg set pieces. The hook is in the inventive, complicated kills, not in the story. You might as well complain about the writing in a porno movie.
I admit that these are pretty lowbrow movies, but they are a guilty pleasure of mine. You’re going to see a whole bunch of twentysomethings die in more and more elaborate freak accidents. It;s like ]Snakes On a Plane. You either know you want to see that or you don’t.
Personally, I kind of find it appealing that I know there isn’t going to be any escape. I also like the fact that there isn’t any bad guy. Shit just happens, and there’s nothing they can do about it.
Thanks for the replies so far.
Grumman has come the closest to addressing my concern. It seems odd to me that no matter what the characters do, they’re all going to die. That doesn’t seem to be a common theme in movies, nor does the opposite idea – no matter what the characters do, they can’t fail.
I understand commenters saying, “Hey, the films are fun” or “Yeah, the movies are bad, but who cares?” But I’m trying to examine this from a screenwriting perspective.
To be clear: I’m not looking down my nose at these films or its fans while I sit at Walden Pond working on my 600-page novel. I appreciate all kinds of entertainment. What I don’t understand, despite the comments, is how a series of films can be both financially successful and rewarding to its audience with no plot.
Battlefield Earth: terrible movie. It had a plot. Transformers: a big loud mess. But remember Shia LaBeouf running through the city to get the All Spark cube to Megatron while the army held off the Decepticons? That means that the bad guys wanted one thing and the good guys wanted another thing and they both had a plan a chance of success. How about the recent Clash of the Titans? Yes, the film felt rushed, big moments were downplayed or came out of nowhere, characterization was at a minimum…but there was a quest (survive the dangers to get Medusa’s head) and a character arc (is Perseus a man or a god?) and a clock (the Kraken will return in 10 days, to either eat Andromeda or destroy Argos). The structure was there, even if the story wasn’t. A subtle distinction, but an important one.
Even bad films, popcorn films, and silly films have a midpoint, a low point, an Act Three moment where the heroes rally…all those Blake Snyder beats that screenwriters love these days. And yet the Final Destination films seem to have none of that, but they still work. Quite an accomplishment.
My recollection of the origin of the franchise was that the writing team of James Wong and Glen Morgan (best known for creating some of the most clever and humorous X-Files episodes) were asked to write a horror movie in which Death itself (him/herself?) was the killer. After some consideration they rejected just having some sort of costumed or CGI-ed “Grim Reaper” figure stalking around as just looking silly in the end. Having the “killer” remain unseen, and be effectively omnipotent, seemed to have much more potential to generate real paranoia and sustained fear.
That was the core idea, but the real staying power over time has come from the Rube Goldberg/splatter porn spectacle value that others here have described.
The real nightmare is just how many lawsuits would result from badly-designed tanning salons, gym equipment and amusement park rides.
Except, that’s not what the Final Destination films do at all. They follow a very simple formula:
Act 1: Some horrible disaster that kills a bunch of people but spares “Someone who can see Death’s plan” and a handful of their friends.
Act 2: “Person who can see Death’s plan” and a handful of their friends figure out that Death has a plan and through researching previous disasters, they realize that they can break the chain and stop Death.
Several friends die during this act.
Act 3: The remaining friends gather together where the “Person who can see Death’s plan” has it all figured out and they manage to break the chain just in time.
Epilogue: The survivors realize they didn’t break the chain completely and Death comes back around for them again. The fate of the remaining characters is left ambiguous until the sequel.
This formula occurs in the first three movies, but the fourth breaks with it by brutally killing off the survivors (and supposedly the franchise, but a fifth is in the works) by saying that Death always wins and that’s always the way it’s been.
How you can then turn around and say this doesn’t count as plot baffles me greatly.
Justin, I can say the films have no plot because that’s what all the commenters seem to be saying:
For that matter, your breakdown of the plot, while helpful – in fact, no one has really done that yet and I do appreciate it – shows the same weakness:
In Act Two, the characters “research” and “realize” and some of them die. That doesn’t sound like very proactive behavior. In the 45 minutes to an hour that constitutes Act Two, what is everyone doing besides researching and realizing and dying? Just living their lives? That sounds boring. Or are there subplots?
In Act Three, you say they “gather,” which doesn’t sound like much. Then they “break the chain” – finally, an action. That I can understand. How do they break the chain? Try to keep the next person from dying or just kill one of their friends early? If it’s the former, how do they know when they’ve succeeded? Couldn’t Death just wait two months and then go back to killing in order?
Scary movies are often cheap vehicles to deliver equally cheap scares. That doesn’t mean they don’t have a plot. Otherwise the movie would be, literally, just shots of people dying. Just because you don’t like the plot doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
The main character researches what’s going on and spends Act Two trying to convince the other characters that they’re destined to die and save them from brutal deaths. This is pretty proactive.
The movie is only going to be an hour and a half long. The horrible event doesn’t even happen until fifteen minutes into the film. Act Two is certainly not an hour long. 45 minutes, maybe. Ten minutes of the protagonist realizing that there’s a pattern and him explaining to his friend (for the benefit of the audience) what his research has uncovered. Ten minutes of friend a dying. Ten minutes of friend b dying. Ten minutes of the protagonist running to try to warn all his friends of the danger before it’s too late. This isn’t difficult.
Realize that disasters are following these kids around. They’re “gathering” all the while evading horrible shit happening to them.
Let’s say there are three survivors at the end- they manage to, three times in a row, survive death’s attempts to kill them. They now believe that they’ve broken the chain. That’s your action.
That’s the point, they only think they’ve succeeded. The epilogues are always ambiguous and you learn in the next film that they’ve died.
This is precisely what happens at the end of the first film. The three survivors think they’ve beaten death and in the epilogue (the audience assumes this is some time later) they’re celebrating their success in Paris or New York or some other big city (it’s been a while, sorry) and while they’re all laughing and enjoying themselves a massive sign that’s having maintenance work done on it breaks and swings towards them. Right before it hits them the screen cuts to black. In the next film you learn that two of the three of them have been splattered.
I could have sworn all the characters always died, and I think I’ve seen every movie, but my memory is a sieve anymore. Maybe some of the last few deaths were just implied.
The female protagonist of the first film manages to survive that movie. I can’t be sure, as it’s been a while, but I think she dies at the end of the second film.
Yep. And the male protagonist dies sometime between the first and second.
Ok, so maybe my brain just filed it as “everybody’s dead” but the chronology doesn’t necessarily clear the screen for every movie.
What? That makes no sense. You, as an spectator, believe in the first case that there is a chance of survival, and therefore enjoy the plot development. In the second case you know there’s no way out and don’t care about the development. It’s not the same thing at all.
It’s like saying that “1984” is a stupid book because you understand at the end that Smith never had a fighting chance.
Whaddya mean? He had the perfect chance to learn to love Big Brother.
I do think Nineteen Eighty-Four is a better propaganda piece than it is a story, but there was at least a way for Smith to claim a pyrrhic victory, right to the end. He could have denied the Party what they wanted, and died a free man.
The point is to provide entertainment while showing us the futility of trying to hide from life and the innumerable ways in which we might die a bloody, shocking, and gruesome death in our everyday existence. Anyone can die at any time with no rhyme or reason. Death just…helps a little ;). Does Tony Todd count as a Magical Negro in these films?
Except for the elevator death in the second film, most of the deaths are possible, if not very likely.
Saucer, the point you seem to be missing is that the characters realize they can’t escape death at the end. By “end”, we don’t mean 20 minutes before the credits. We mean, like, 60 seconds. The climax happens well before that part.
My summary is as follows:
Part 1 - A high school French class is boarding a plane to go to Paris. Some students avoid death due to premonition.
Part 2 - One of the kids dies later in an apparent suicide, but we know it to be an elaborate accident. Protagonist Alex (Devin Sawa, my celebrity doppelganger) finds out that death is coming back for them. He runs around trying to convince the friends that they’re about to die. Some believe him. Some don’t.
Part 3 - The ones that believe Alex try to hide from death. One kid is scheduled to die next, but narrowly avoids death. Instead, the next kid dies seconds later. They realize that you can escape death and it’ll skip over you.
Part 4 - Carter, Alex, and Clear cheat death and survive. They win! They win!
Part 5 - Six months later, the three meet up in Paris, their “final destination” from the original plane trip. They’re all like “Hey, we finally made it to Paris! And we’re all still alive! Yay!” Then Clear gets a premonition that Alex will die, just like before the plane crash. She saves him from getting hit by a bus. Yay! They live again!
…not. SMACK!
Cut to black, roll credits.
How is that not a plot?
Just like the characters from FD have a chance at cheating Death if they just find the right way of breaking the chain.
There’s a plot, it’s a perfectly reasonable if not particularly deep plot: a character is threatened, tries to solve his problem, it’s all futile and dies at the end anyway. Not all stories need to have happy endings.
You’re contradicting yourself. If it’s really as futile as you and others suggest, there is no right way of breaking the chain. Death always gets his way, the characters always die in vain, and I always go find something better to watch.
I’m not complaining about downer endings, I’m complaining about endings which use the equivalent of railroading to render the characters’ actions meaningless.