Fly the Friendly Skies

Rating: 8/10 (27 March 2000)

If you really want to scare someone, don't tell them another "guy with a hook" campfire story. Skip the urban legends and cheesy ghost story fare. Because what really scares people is real life.
Go through the list of every possible way to die in any given situation. Mention how easy it is for a plane engine to fail, or a car to break an essential part. Comment on the plethora of common household items that, if they were to be involved in just the right coincidences, might result in your death.
If you really want to scare someone, take them to Final Destination.
The lead character, a high schooler named Alex Browning, is waiting on-board an international flight to Paris along with almost 40 of his classmates. During the wait, Alex has a premonition that the plane is going to blow up. He ditches the flight, taking several classmates and a teacher with him in the broil his panic incites. These precious few have their lives changed when, sure enough, the airplane explodes just after claiming the skies.
The premise: those people were supposed to die, and now Death is simply getting caught up on his list. This means there is no killer, there is no hockey-masked looney with a rubber knife. There is a slight breeze, a brief, anamolous shadow, and then, you're dead.
The craftsmanship here is excellent. The deaths are all very disturbing, all very real, and all very brutal, and the effect is nauseatingly refreshing. We don't see hysterical people running up the stairs to escape a never-tired creep, or jabbing meat thermometers into supernatural critters. We see a pattern of easily explained, perfectly normal, lethally designed events that not only cause death, but also adapt to the victim's movements. No matter where they go, death is at their heels, following them in the endless coincidences. And it's all the more terrifying because it's supposed to happen, and there's no one to fight. The most any of the characters can hope for is that Alex will predict it and, perhaps, intervene in time. Needless to say, Alex's track record for saving his friends drops drastically post-plane crash.
The acting, though excellent, is a bit forced at points, and there are parts of the movie created solely to pad the film. A cringe-worthy expository interlude with a cheesy mortician and some repetitive dialogue are the only weak links in the show, however. The very concept of the flick is so interesting that it laminates all the duller moments.
The premise is, of course, self-destructive. Death can't die so no matter how many times the characters manage to cheat the traps that seem to be laid for them, sooner or later, the chain of events will be set in motion all over again. It doesn't end until they die. This type of problem might have crippled most horror movies, but Final Destination cleverly eludes the chance of a weak and long-overdue ending by cashing in on the repetitive "tag-you're-dead" quality of the plot. It ends with the understanding that it hasn't ended.
Not for the squeamish of heart, this movie is a landmark in the horror movie genre. Although it's not going to win any Oscars anytime soon, this well-timed and moodily constructed film does exactly what movies are intended to do: it entertains. It reveals the possibility that villains are all well and good, but the true horror lies in real death, in a murderer that exists in every inanimate object you come across.
Oooh. Scary, huh?