Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on March 17, 2000, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
If you have a fear of flying (and even if you don’t), the first 20 minutes or so of Final Destination will likely prove the most unnerving. Not just because the plane crash scene upon which the story pivots is frighteningly well-staged, but because director James Wong knows that half the fear involves simply getting on board. Filming from the point of view of nervous protagonist Alex (Devon Sawa), Wong captures all the little details that get the acrophobia going: the long walk down the boarding corridor, the close look afforded at the chipped paint around the airliner door, the innocents (little kids, a physically handicapped man) that you know God wouldn’t let die, even as you’re sure that this flight will be the exception that proves the rule.
For Alex, of course, Flight 180 (the movie’s original title) does turn out to be one of those exceptions. But after his pre-takeoff premonition of the plane’s fiery midair explosion, his subsequent freakout leads him, five other students and a teacher to be ejected from the aircraft. Following the disaster, Alex and the others find survivors’ guilt variously difficult to deal with—and soon begin falling victim to bizarre accidents. It becomes clear to Alex that Death, incensed at being cheated out of seven lives, is seeking them out one by one, and his life becomes consumed by his efforts to avoid fate once again.
Final Destination’s first couple of reels are so good at capturing reality-based fear, and the psychological aftershocks of avoiding the crash, that it’s a tad disappointing when the movie takes its turn into fantasy. Still, up until the final sequence, Wong and co-scripter/producer Glen Morgan, working from a story by Jeffrey Reddick, elevate this a few notches above the usual teen chiller. The story’s underpinnings about fate and mortality give the horrific goings-on an additional resonance, even as the Rube Goldberg-esque deaths themselves play more like the work of a malevolent prankster than an ageless force. They’re as blackly humorous as they are scary—with the exception of one out-of-nowhere demise that’s a guaranteed seat-jumper.
But then—oh, that ending. After a very well-staged climactic setpiece, the movie closes with a coda that is utterly ridiculous, violating first the movie’s character logic and then its dramatic logic. It’s abundantly clear that it was shot and added to the film after test audiences disapproved of the initial ending. At least both closings will be included on the eventual DVD to allow viewers to decide for themselves.
For the most part, though, Wong and Morgan have created a nicely chilly entertainment that benefits from sympathetic performances. After his nimble comic turn in the underrated Idle Hands, Sawa is equally good in this more grounded (pardon the pun) role, and Ali Larter, given more to do here than in House on Haunted Hill, scores as a fellow survivor who comes to believe in Alex’s theories about Death’s pattern (and is thus most likely to survive). The naming of all the characters after classic horror directors (Browning, Lewton, etc.) is an unobtrusive in-joke; perhaps most telling, given Wong and Morgan’s X Files background, is the fact that the most unsympathetic character (a jerk of a jock played by Kerr Smith) is named “Carter.” And for modern genre buffs, there’s a brief, effective cameo by erstwhile Candyman Tony Todd, as a mortician who knows a little bit too much about just how Death works.
