The Poppies of Terra #56 - Carpe Diestination

As I rewatched the first five entries in the Final Destination (2000-present) film franchise this past week in anticipation of the sixth release, I felt a little itch in the back of my mind regarding the series’ ingenious premise.

In each entertaining installment, one or more characters receives a premonition of sorts, involving a disaster like an exploding plane or a freeway pile-up. Acting on this foreknowledge of what’s to come, the clairvoyant in question extricates him or herself from the circumstances that would have killed them, and typically manages to save a clutch of other characters in the bargain. The disaster proceeds as foreseen, but this handful of souls avoids it. Because these actions violate normal cause and effect, and the folks spared are now living “unnaturally”–without any supernatural premonitions they would have died–, the universe imposes a rebalancing of cosmic forces and orchestrates the demise of these characters. One by one, they’re picked off via freak accidents in the precise order in which they would have died in the original disaster. Salvation is temporary at best; destiny invariably metes out is comeuppance, or as the case may be, comedownance; and we in the audience hope against hope that somehow a loophole will be found and someone will outsmart the grand dastardly design. It would be nice if there were a way out, wouldn’t it?

Final Destination: Bloodlines (dir. Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein), the new flick, is made with genuine passion and evident respect for the franchise. It’s directed with a (four?) steady hand(s), maintains equipoise between previously established lore and the desire to stretch the formula, and executes the hell out of the death sequences. In short, it understands the mission brief and goes after it with a vengeance. While the previous five movies all started in narratively identical fashion, Bloodlines intriguingly cuts from the opening Irwin Allen-esque disaster montage, set decades ago, to the present. It also uses previously established “rules” in a fun way–and introduces one major new plot element, namely the question of what would happen if a disaster was prevented entirely. Outside of the original Back to the Future (1985), I can’t think of many screenplays that even come close to this one in terms of setups and payoffs. For the nearly two hours of the film’s duration, I kept wondering if its opening frame–several minutes before arriving at the scene where the disaster will unfold–, had merely been a stylistic choice to kick things off with excitement, or we would eventually loop back to it. Boy, do we ever.

Performances, too, are a notch above the other entries, with the possible exception of Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s memorable turn as the lead of Final Destination 3 (2006). Tony Todd provides not only continuity, but closure, in a touching, meta-narrative scene. The film blends its scares and humor into a thoroughly engrossing strain of black comedy (a tonal aspiration that the recent The Monkey left woefully unfulfilled), and its pacing, despite the longer-than-usual runtime, is expertly managed, squeezing out tension in metronomic oodles or galloping towards cardiac arrest as behooves each scene.

Clearly, then, I had a great time in the theater, as did my audience, if the groans and guffaws are a reliable indicator. Beyond all that, though, in the aftermath of the screening the niggling sensation in the back of my consciousness during the last week was, at last, alleviated! A notion emerged, which I will now elaborate.

The question that led to this idea was: Why does this situation feel familiar? I’ve seen all these movies before, and it’s been over a decade since the last one–but that wasn’t it. There was a deeper storytelling resonance at work here, I suspected, one I didn't immediately locate.

The idea of death as an intractable and non-personalized force, of course, is present in a number of well-known tales. I wondered if maybe one of these was responsible for my hunch about the classical origins of the Final Destination conceit. The Epic of Gilgamesh deals with the universality of death, with Enkidu’s passing spurring Gilgamesh to seek life eternal. In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, fate ineluctably delivers ruin and death–such is the nature of tragedy. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto connects death to prophecy and moral correction. In M. G. Lewis’ The Monk, retribution inevitably follows sin. Death in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland is relentlessly causal. Think of other horror classics, like Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, or Guy de Maupassant’s The Horla, or Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, or Oliver Onion’s The Beckoning Fair One. One could easily continue adding titles to the list of works where death is abstract and non-corporeal, but nevertheless rooted in specific narrative dimensions like genealogy, psychological instability, or the surrender to temptation. 

Another concept in these films has ancient roots. In Euripides’ Alcestis, King Admetus is fated to die, but Apollo bargains with the Fates so that someone else may die in his stead, a role claimed by his heroic wife, the titular Alcestis. (Things don’t end there. Enter Hercules). In the Sumerian myth of Inanna’s Descent to the Netherworld, Inanna, goddess of love, perishes in the underworld, but is allowed to return to life if she can choose a substitute to take her place–which she does (her uncaring husband Dumuzid, who has not mourned her). Here we have examples of cosmic swaps, of life-for-life trades, territory some of the Final Destination sequels have ventured into.

But none of these examples soothed my mental prickle.

After watching Bloodlines, though, what I was searching for finally became clear. The plot, without giving much away, involves the expiration of several generations, starting decades ago and, at the time of the story, catching up with the present. This got me thinking. What if we followed that logic backward, past all imaginable human disasters, to the ultimate extreme, back and back and back to our most recent common ancestors?

At that instant, it crystallized. Like so many other works of modern pop culture, Final Destination echoes storytelling … from the Bible. Consider. In Genesis, we learn that Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, gaining information they were not, under normal means, supposed to possess. Herewith their “forbidden insight,” just like the ones experienced by the Final Destination clairvoyants. Adam and Eve’s behavior violates divine order; similarly, by “cheating death,” our contemporary characters disrupt an intended design. In both cases, the consequences cannot be escaped: Adam and Eve are summarily ejected from Eden, mortality imposed on them and their descendants, while Final Destination’s stealth-mode death sneakily creeps up on the survivors who have trespassed against the Plan and gleefully “corrects” their disruptions. Seen in this light, the Final Destination franchise repackages a well-known cautionary tale about the limits of human agency for modern audiences. But it does more than that. It pokes and probes at the seams of the story, like most of us do the first time we hear about Adam and Eve. What if this, it wonders, and what if that? Film after film, various tantalizing scenarios are run for us.

Well–has any character in the six films succeeded? Has anyone managed to outsmart Death for an extended period of time? At what cost? More specifically, is anyone from the first five movies theoretically alive in Bloodline’s present day? Setting aside alternate cuts and deleted scenes, and going only by what is shown in the theatrical versions of the films, it would appear that the answer is yes. I’m not thinking of Bloodworth, either, and I won’t spoil his role in Bloodlines. Best I can tell, there is no canonical in-universe information showing that Officer Burke and Kimberly Corman, from Final Destination 2 (2003), have died.

Not only that, but given the aforementioned thematic parallels with Adam and Eve, Kimberly is a particularly interesting protagonist. She deliberately drives herself into a lake to die, in the hopes of resetting the scheme. Her act of sacrifice is motivated by a sense of moral duty, not self-interest. She’s burdened with a kind of “divine” knowledge and feels a responsibility to save those around her. And after drowning, she is revived by CPR–literally resurrected. Sound familiar?

Despite that symbolic heft, she’s not intrinsically a particularly compelling character, and has not been featured since the second installment. I'd like to propose a different nomination in her place. This franchise has been quiet since Final Destination 5 (2011). While that film had an ending that nicely closed the circle, so to speak, the film itself didn’t redefine things. But this new entry has upped the stakes and seriously reanimated this universe. Given its high marks with critics, and great box-office opening, I submit that Final Destination: Bloodlines is–at least for the time being–the franchise’s true savior.