29: Final Destination

This is another case of a good movie which gets lumped in with its really bad sequels. Unlike Saw, which couldn't be more different from the films it spawned, the problem with Final Destination was that the films were all basically the same. There just really wasn't any room to innovate within a fairly restrictive Premise.

A group of college students are at the airport on their class trip to France. Before the Plane has a chance to take off, Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) has a vision of the plane crashing. He causes a panic and gets kicked off the plane, along with a few others. The Plane does explode, killing everyone on board. It is a major blow, but in time the survivors begin recovering from their loss. Until they start dying. They die, one by one, in the exact order they would have had they stayed on the plane.

What's more, Alex keeps seeing signs whenever Death is coming to claim one of them. He has to desperately try to piece together who is dying, where, and how, all in the minutes before their death. His mostly fruitless struggles help enhance the paranoid atmosphere, as now the audience is constantly watching out for signs that death is coming, and for mundane dangerous objects that could prove lethal, and for whatever new twist death seems to constantly have up his sleeve.

To be honest, the reason I like the film has nothing to do with story, and everything to do with the execution. This film is just a standard slasher with an interesting gimmick. It borrows a lot of its structure and its tropes from other good films. But this film is good because of the way it is shot. When death is after the one of the people, it feels like it can come from anywhere. The death sequences really take center stage. They can be slow and messy, or they can come out of nowhere. Whenever the people think they have figured out how to cheat them, the rules change. A lot of everyday objects seem capable of accidentally killing you, and the film builds tension from that fact.

The first death, in which Chad Donella's character slips on a puddle of water in his bathroom and gets his neck tangled up in a length of wire used as a clothesline is probably the best scene in the film. It feels like it could really happen to someone if they aren't careful, and that's what makes it as memorable as it is. He just suffocated, slowly. Some of the deaths in the film's second half were campy , but the fact that the hanging was so brutal gave the film a lot of its power.

The film has a bit of a problem maintaining that atmosphere all the way to the end, however. Between the last several deaths being more silly than scary, and the ending being pure fun, it is easy to dismiss this as just another teen slasher like they make every year. That is really selling a pretty great movie short, though. It might just be me, but any film that delivers this much great atmospherics and this many cool kills deserves to be remembered fondly.