Friday Night Movie Club
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Humanity has never been so fragile as it is in theFinal Destinationmovies.
Its the most harrowing of horror franchises, and the most ridiculous.
(Thatd be the second film.)
In the third, its a doozy of arollercoaster accident.
In the fourth (called, simply,The Final Destination), itsan explosive racetrack calamity.
In the fifth, itsthe bridge collapse to end all bridges.
Each movie also features the survivors discovering a new way to potentially thwart deaths design.
By and large, their plans dont work out.
Ill admit, I wasnt all that charmed by the first picture when I saw it back in 2000.
I even remember some genuinely heated debates with a few of my more forward-thinking colleagues about it.
I found the idea nifty, but the character moves seemed familiar and the deaths themselves laughable.
ButFinal Destination 2might also be the most human of the series.
In this sense,Final Destination 2is cruel.
A few scenes later, that same grieving mother is slowly, agonizingly beheaded by an elevator.
The movie takes the average slashers combination of laughter and faux-pathos to stomach-churning extremes.
It also adds another existential twist.
Death, much like life, feels like a long string of tiny missed connections with multiple ripple effects.
The great Krzysztof Kieslowski spent his whole career making pictures about this phenomenon.
He died before this series was born (coincidence?
), but I wonder what he might have made of these movies.
Later installments focus less on fate and more on one-upping each other with the kills.
Theyre emptier, perhaps, but still, in their own ways, spectacular.
Which might be, ironically, another reason why theyre so strangely cathartic.
Such neverending, exhausting anxiety can make life look like a series of booby traps.
You waste your days creatingwhat ifscenarios in your head.
We all have it to some degree.
Some us more than others.
TheFinal Destinationfilms meet us halfway and say,Youre right.That socket is going to blow.
That oil will spill.
That crane will collapse.
That kayak you hung on the wall will fall.
Those weights can and will crush your head like a cantaloupe.
And wont that be stupid?
Weirdly, its a liberating thought.
