Is there a movie series more dependent on its opening sequence than Final Destination? The long-dormant existential slasher franchise returns to theaters this week with Final Destination Bloodlines, the sixth movie and the first one in 14 years, while the first five remain streaming attractions on Max. The new film carries on a rich traditon of these movies having the most elaborate opening set pieces this side of James Bond.
Actually, Final Destination arguably outdoes Bond, because for years the trademark Bond opener was an elaborate action sequence that didn’t have much bearing on the 130-minute movie that followed. Final Destination movies, meanwhile, are often under 90 minutes before the end credits roll, so their big inciting disasters that set the plot into motion can take up a substantial percentage of the total runtime. The template is simple: The lead character experiences a large-scale freak accident that spirals out of control and takes many lives, ending with his or her own. The protagonist then jumps back to before the accident, realizes they’ve just had an intense premonition of a disaster to come, and just barely escapes the carnage, typically saving five or six additional lives in the process. Then, death comes for all of them, one by one, correcting their premonition-assisted dodging of their true fate.
So basically, a lot rides on the opening slaughter of any given Final Destination picture, because not only will a lot of screen time be expended on showing it (usually more than once), but the event will reverberate through the rest of the film. With the new movie trying something different – an opening disaster that takes place well before the turn of the millennium – it seems like a good time to go through the six entries and rank how well they send their characters to their final destinations.
The quality of a Final Destination opening isn’t always one-to-one with the quality of the rest of the film; the best opening sequence doesn’t actually lead to the best movie overall. But the worst opening does match with the worst of the batch in a walk: the fourth film, once intended as a series finale, hence its now-confusing title of The Final Destination. In this installment, a group of friends goes to an auto race, where one dope’s gleeful anticipation of seeing a good crash goes horribly awry. The sequence is a strange mixture of overelaborate – does a racecar crash really require an eerie series of coincidences to explain it? – and haphazard, as it’s essentially about a bunch of debris sailing into the grandstands and splattering people, depicted via some of the series’ cheapest-looking, ugliest CG gore. It’s a major disappointment given that director David R. Ellis had plenty of second-unit experience on big-budget action movies (and had previously directed a series highlight… stay tuned!); like the rest of the movie, it doesn’t feel like anyone was trying very hard here. One minor bit of redemption: Later in the movie, an audience watching a 3D movie starts exhibiting eerie parallels with the racetrack opening, which of course was also the opening sequence of a 3D movie at the time. Meta! But not enough to excuse the slapdash nature of the opening itself.
The fifth film is notable for (a.) getting the series back into a watchable place after the disaster of the previous film, (b.) utilizing characters who are young adults with jobs, rather than high school or college students, and (c.) timeline shenanigans that feed into a clever movie-ending twist. As it happens, none of that particularly affects its passable opening, where a group of employees are taking a bus to a workplace retreat and wind up stuck on a collapsing bridge. The setting is relatably squirm-inducing (who hasn’t shivered when driving over a bridge at some point?) and provides a pleasing variety of demises (it’s a car crash and a structure collapse all in one!), but the busload of employees feels like a school-age concept hastily reformatted for supposed adults, and the gore remains pretty janky. The bright side: This Final Destination boilerplate does leave room for the movie’s later, smaller-scale death sequences to handily outdo it, allowing the movie to improve as it goes.
In classic slasher tradition, the big sequence that kicks off the whole series is much less gory and more suspense-oriented than what would follow. As such, it probably deserves a higher spot on the list for the way it develops the paranoia of high school student Alex (Devon Sawa) as he observes unnerving and seemingly random little details in the run-up to his plane ripping apart on takeoff, then exploding in mid-air. But compared to what would become the signature Final Destination style, the first movie’s opening operates differently, more interested in a slow, eerie build toward disaster than the more rococo elaborations of the sequels. By design, it’s not as immediately memorable as much of what would follow – both in the rest of this movie, and in the openings of its many sequels.
James Wong and Glen Morgan, the team behind the original movie, returned for the third one, giving their mischievous, X-Files-honed sensibilities another shot at an opening horror gauntlet now that the series formula is more firmly established. They don’t disappoint, building the deathtrap rollercoaster of horror-fan dreams (and plenty of nightmares). The idea of a screaming-heavy thrill ride literally flying off the rails isn’t just an irresistible exploitation of a common fear; it’s also a brilliant subversion of horror-movie mechanics. After all, what are a lot of horror movies if not scream machines designed to scare you in the moment and deliver you safely back to the real world by the end? Final Destination 3 cleverly plays with that sense of identification, gleefully punishing thrill-seekers for their youthful exuberance.
First, a nitpick: This movie seems to have no idea when, exactly, its first explicitly twentieth-century opening sequence is supposed to be taking place. By the movie’s timeline, it should be around 1975. By the fashions on display, it looks like the early 1960s. The various music cues, including a full band covering the Isley Brothers’ “Shout” and a radio playing Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising,” only confuse the issue further. (Obviously those songs could be playing in 1975, but they don’t seem meant to signify the mid-’70s.) That said, there’s a tonal and textural novelty in having this destruction of a skyscraper restaurant take place in a different time than the 2000s, minus the usual cohort of callow teenagers. There’s a good reason to situate it in the 1970s, even if the period dressing doesn’t quite match: That was a boom time for disaster cinema, to which the Final Destination movies have operated as a sort of disreputable cousin. Here, the sense of a Rube Goldberg series of mishaps (amusing urged along by the presence of a particularly unlucky penny) actually interrupting a bunch of real lives is a little fuller in this telling, and the building’s slow collapse provides a gruesome variety of deaths, even if the extent of the damage feels particularly far-fetched. Anyway, it’s hard to complain when this sequence features the series’ only death by piano (to date, anyway).
The series masterpiece, such that it both overshadows the rest of the second movie (which is good but not the best of the bunch) and also has been thought of by anyone in the past 22 years who has ever passed a truck hauling lumber on the highway. David R. Ellis, the aforementioned stunt coordinator and second-unit director who also made some memorable 2000s-era B-pictures, marshals his experiences working with larger-scale action to up the ante on the first Final Destination sequel, building off of a familiar yet potentially deadly activity – driving fast on a heavy-traffic highway – to create a kind of action-horror symphony of destruction, centered on that log-carrying truck. Though the mayhem is bombastic, it’s also weirdly believable, perhaps moreso than any other Final Destination opener, it plays with the idea of how little has to go wrong to create a horrific chain reaction.
Crucially, FD2 also captures the series at a moment before nearly everything would be computer-generated; obviously there are plenty of visual effects in the scene, but the blood doesn’t look so digitized as in later installments, and the explosive car crashes have real weight. Though the slow-motion shot of the logs falling from their truck bed is probably the single most iconic in the series, don’t sleep on the final moment of the initial disaster: the heroine (A.J. Cook) watching in horror from her wrecked vehicle as another car, where the driver is burning alive, gets knocked out of the way by an oncoming truck emerging from more fire, heading straight for her. Cinema!
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.
