James Wong’s 2000 film, Final Destination, spawned an entire franchise following death’s design and psychic phenomena. After five films and a sixth in the works, the first installment remains the best film of the franchise. Originating as a spec script by Jeffrey Reddick for The X-Files, a New Line Cinema’s agent persuaded him to make it a feature-length film. The trio of Wong, Reddick, and Glen Morgan wrote the screenplay. Making his directorial debut, James Wong’s Final Destination premiered in theaters nationwide in March of 2000.
Starring Devon Sawa as Alex Browning, the film opens on a class of high schoolers boarding a plane to Paris. As the students prepare for take-off, Alex has a premonition that the Boeing 747 will explode shortly after it is airborne. After which, he pleads with all of the passengers to get off of Flight 180. Alex and his classmates Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), Carter Horton (Kerr Smith), Terry Chaney (Amanda Detmer), Todd Wagner (Chad Donella), Billy Hitchcock (Seann William Scott), and their teacher Valerie Lewton (Kristen Cloke) are escorted off of the plane.
The plane explodes just as Alex predicted. Mourning the loss of their friends and peers, they all go their separate ways and steer clear of Alex. As each of the survivors begin to die one by one in the strangest of ways, they realize they have disrupted death’s design for their fate. Seeking to set the design right, death comes to each of them in the order they were meant to die in the accident and rights the wrongs made by Alex when he saved them.
Why The First Movie Is STILL The Franchise’s Best
When the supernatural horror film debuted in 2000, no other director or writer had ventured to produce a film that questioned if death had a design for its victims. It was a refreshing concept and opened up new possibilities for how the symbol of death can be omnipresent throughout a horror film. For Final Destination, death did not come in the form of a monster, serial killer, or any other type of villain. It came in the form of an invisible presence that determined the way that each character died and when they would die.
Since the first film, installments in the franchise have attempted to live up to the unique concepts that were introduced by their predecessor. While Final Destination 2 came close to hitting the mark, nothing quite captures the fear of the first moment a film establishes that fate is inescapable and death is unavoidable. By the third and fourth installments, the concept began to get stale. The franchise’s structure became predictable and ran out of ways to bring back the essence of the first film.
In summation, the original 2000 Final Destination film is still the best in the franchise because of its originality and uniqueness that has yet to be recaptured by a sequel. As a sixth installment nears release, fans of the franchise can look forward to new and inventive methods that could end up being a worthy rival to the original.