Surrealist suspense(spoilers)

Rating: 7/10 (28 August 2000)

'Final Destination' pulls off a great trick. While managing to retain a commendably non-'Scream' seriousness of purpose, a solemn accretion of suspense, a faithfulness to genuine fears and emotions, the multiple deaths in the film are as blackly funny as they are elaborately gruesome; but this note of the comic in an otherwise grimly portentous movie, never betrays its ambitions. These ARE some deaths, though; some intolerably protracted, implausibly set up, yet deliciously executed; others sharp, horrifying, hilarious shocks, one of which suggest the scriptwriters must have seen Lynne-Maree Danzay's brilliant short 'Fetch', where autobuses are used to similar effect.
With films like 'The Sixth Sense' and 'X-Men', it looks like Surrealism, once mocked as a dotty, marginal movement, has finally pervaded the Hollywood mainstream. Not only does most of the action take place at night, but there is also an early suggestion that the whole thing is dreamt by Alex, not just the first plane crash - as he falls asleep on the eve of the trip, the clock showing 1:00 fades into the 180 that is the number of the plane; the dissolve is drawn attention to, signalling a move into the dream or imagined that the film never comes out of. The narrative, therefore, becomes an expanded Unconscious, a drama of a whole set of fears.
It is appropriate that Alex is 17, on the brink of adulthood - his dad dolefully suggests that his whole life is ahead of him, as if freedom, youth, fun are all at an end. And they are. As all fears are often sexual in basis, it is appropriate that Alex doesn't reach the final destination of the title at first - the plane crash is a coitus interruptus, like the bomb that stops the kiss in 'Touch of Evil'; it is a stunting of growth, a refusal to move into adulthood, to progress sexually (Paris, of course, being the stereotypical city of love). As his friends are either trying to get off with girls, or are lucky enough to have one, Alex remains a solitary figure, locked into his own mind, whose only sexual relief is an old copy of Penthouse.
Whereas the teen movie, for all its modish trappings, is generally conservative, concerned with finding a mate, fitting in, asserting order, like a Shakespearean comedy, setting the continuity of the species in motion, Alex is a destructive force, linked to death (the scrappaper with Tod written on it, as well as alluding to his friend, also refers to the German word for death), sterility; we are never quite convinced that the events are out of his control. In one brilliant sequence of cross-cutting, Alex's opening of his Penthouse is linked with the leak of Tod's toilet, setting in motion his friend's death, Alex's onanistic seed a murderous power.
As the film proceeds, he becomes increasingly detached from community, from reality, setting himself up as a godlike power, imposing patterns on the randomness of life, right down to the obscurely arrogant climactic gesture of self-sacrifice. Even when order seems to be asserted at the end, he has finally reached Paris, and he has a relationship with a woman, has joined the status quo, he is unable to deal with it, he has to destroy it. Like Melville's 'Le Samourai', 'Destination' is a dream of masculine selfhood, of wholeness, of the fears that it will be diluted, fragmented, by compromise, society, difference. As a study in heightened megalomania, 'Destination' reaches heights from modest ambitions unavailable to the risible pretentions of the 'Beach'.
The Surrealist aesthetic also informs the film's treatment of suspense, a steady accretion of 'normal', familiar, domestic details, imbued with the terror of a diseased mind - the opening airport sequences are a masterpiece of anticipatory dread, the everyday made malevolent. The unsensational revelation of the plane explosion, a mere firework, in the background as boys fight, is staggeringly, resonantly beautiful, sequences such as the tasteless memorial to the air-crash victims - a statue of an eagle! - suggest that Surrealism, as Breton said of the English, is less a view of the world than a way of life. For some reason films like this and 'The Faculty' are treated with hostility and indifference by critics. Don't you realise you are living in a golden age of horror movies?