Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Fatma Suarez The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Ella-May O'Brien Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

TheLittleSongbird 'Final Destination' is most notable for two things mainly. The first being that it was the introduction of a fascinating and clever premise that is pretty unique for a supernatural horror. The other being that it was the feature film directing debut of James Wong, best known beforehand as a veteran of 'The X Files'.It spawned four sequels with the fifth film being released in 2011. While it is flawed and somewhat of an uneven film, the first 'Final Destination' is still, six years after the fifth film, one of the franchise's better outings. Perhaps even the best, and the one where the premise feels the freshest. The more stale the concept got, the more the novelty wore off and the less effective the film. Could 'Final Destination' have executed its premise better? Perhaps. Mostly, to me, it did it quite well.Visually, 'Final Destination' looks pretty good for low budget. It's slickly shot and very atmospheric, while the plane effects in the Flight 180 plane scene/explosion are quite impressive. The music score has a suitable eeriness.The film is never dull and is a vast majority of the time fun and suspenseful, with elaborately creative death scenes that are ingeniously unsettling. The film's highlight is the opening Flight 180 scene, anyone already with a fear of flying will have their fear exemplified and it is likely to turn people from boarding a plane for a while. Wong does competently with the directing and the portrayal of Death is an interesting and well done one.Acting varies, with personable Devon Sawa, affecting Ali Larter and Tony Todd's creepy cameo coming off best. Really liked the characters' surnames, that were nifty homages to horror/suspense icons.Not all the acting works however. The others are saddled with one-dimensional and flatly written roles and are a mix of bland (Kristen Cloke) and irritating (Kerr Smith), also found myself not being able to take Seann William Scott seriously.The biggest issue is the script, which is very high in the cheese and awkwardness factors and there is some clumsy exposition that often feels under-explored and not really going anywhere. Generally the story is nice, but things could have been explained better and explored more and it's a little too reliant on coincidence. Things also take a dumb turn towards the end before the film concludes on a logic-defying note.Overall, patchy but entertaining. 7/10 Bethany Cox

achmoye I know it's a popular horror movie, but how does it matter. The acting is quite ridiculous, cinematography is poor and amateurish, the only good thing in this movie is the concept of Death being fooled by people saved from it. Oh, and of course it's not scary. It create funny scenes (yes, because it's completely unbelievable, not just unlikely to happen), or chain reactions. That's it. I love the scene where one char makes a lot of precautions to avoid death in his apartment though. Is that even a great concept ? I mean, Death doesn't really care about us. It's not personal, you know. Death just makes sure some people die frequently, it's not like it's gonna make a complex, tedious chain reaction to kill you, and specifically you. You escaped a plane crash. Whatever, dude, Death is just gonna kill some old people instead. You know.

sebijin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7-w8NjxzWcI started a series called "RECAP" on YouTube where I recap and review movies, anime, TV shows and more. I'm going through the Final Destination series as the first movie franchise and it's been interesting going back and watching these films again after so many years. I know they're older, but I'm interested in hearing other people's thoughts about them as well. I ended up enjoying Final Destination 1, even though the series gets derivative after a while. In terms of a premise for a film, Final Destination was the first of its kind. It's execution in discussing premonitions and death's design is really well fleshed out. We get tons of disturbing, but amazing death scenes, and the rest of the franchise pretty much does the same. As we continue to take a look at the rest of the franchise though, we will start to notice that these things that made the movie unique, ended up creating a ton of clichés. This could be for better or for worse.To say that Final Destination is a horror film is a bit of a stretch, though it definitely has a few moments where you can feel uneasy and the gore is very apparent when it's main attraction is death. I would have to say though that this movie is more of a laugh fest at times than a horror film, of course, I myself tend to laugh at most horror films anyways, so some of that is just me. The acting surprised me the most. When you think of a movie with teenagers in it, you'll commonly think that it's going to be a bad film and then together with the fact that this is a quote-on-quote horror film, the two don't really mix. But this particular group of actors worked really well together and played each of their stereotypical parts without being overly dramatic. Devon Sawa and Ali Larter to be exact, the actors that played Alex and Clear, both showed emotional attachments to their part. Not to mention the fact, that Tony Todd as a coroner was practically the perfect casting.The cinematography was really well done. Even though the foreshadowing was pushed in our face every few minutes, at least it was done with some really neat shots with tons of close ups. What made the deaths particularly interesting, was the fact that some of these close up shots didn't have a thing to do with the actual death, so we actually had to guess what would end up being the final straw that broke the camel's back. James Wong, the director and lead screenwriter of the film did an excellent job with this one. You could say that that's not too surprising, since he's also worked on The X-Files series. But he also did Dragonball Evolution...For a movie that's now almost 18 years old, I must say, Final Destination is still worth watching. It's ironically good at times and for the most part, it's a pretty good film in general. I find myself enjoying it through and through. If you can get past the teenage stereotypes and the sometimes goofy and impossible deaths – this is the movie for you.

romanorum1 The movie has an interesting premise: A high school student, aboard an airplane and waiting to depart on his French classes' flight to Paris, has a premonition: a ghastly vision of an explosion. He then raises a commotion and bolts from the craft. A few minutes later the plane explodes in midair just after takeoff, killing everyone aboard. The view from the terminal is terrific, with glass shattering everywhere. The young man and six others – who have disembarked during the turmoil – have cheated death, but death, though unfeeling, hates to be cheated. And so for the rest of the movie death stalks the survivors, and picks them off one by one. Meanwhile the main character tries to figure out the death patterns to stay ahead of fate. As a mortician later tells Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) and sympathizing friend Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), "The risk of cheating the plan, of disrespecting the design, could incite a fury that could terrorize even the Grim Reaper."The whole feeling is one of doom, that something is out to get you, as writer Mark Twain thought of his family tragedies. Inanimate objects turn against people, like water, wind, electrical wires, vodka, gas cans, knives, lanterns, fish hooks, candles, a garage- door opener, etc. And folks die in various ways, like an elaborate strangulation, decapitation, traffic accident, fire, etc. When John Denver's tune, "Rocky Mountain High" is played, watch out for a falling sign! So we have a bizarre chain of connected events, like a Rube Goldberg machine. In the early 20th century Goldberg created cartoons for newspapers that depicted complicated gadgets that performed tasks in complex ways. FBI agents and others think that Alex is some kind of freak, especially because of his theories about death's design. The last half of the film focuses on Alex's increasing paranoia and precautions, like his opening of tin cans while wearing heavy gloves lest he should severely cut himself and get blood-poison. His lit candles are placed in water bowls as protection against an ill wind that may knock them over.Despite an interesting story-line, the film has its negatives. For one, the acting is just so-so, especially with co-lead Ali Larter. In addition, this morphs into just another horror film. Also, there are the plot flaws. One may say, "Why save someone's life as he will be doomed anyway?" You may come to the same conclusion by adding, "Why do we have doctors?" Nevertheless Director James Wong's concept was popular enough with teen viewers so that four sequels were produced. But the characters were mostly created just to be knocked off, although not quite as badly as those in the "Friday the Thirteenth" series. You may be entertained by it.