Death is not the End. Review on Final Destination Movie

After few minutes into the movie when all the main characters are about to board a flight to Paris in the airport, a man gives a book to our main protagonist of the movie Browning and tells him that “Death is not the end” and leaves by saying “Hare Rama”. In Indian philosophy, there is this concept of life after death and he means exactly the same by saying those words. If at all the inclusion of such a scene is to create an optimistic impact about death in viewer’s mind, the movie just ends up doing the opposite. The movie makes us all fear about death. The movie dealing with the philosophy of death is pretentious for the most part. But I have got no complaints as I think the main aim of the makers in this movie is to give us an entertaining edge of the seat thriller than dealing with the Indian philosophy and myth.

A group of high school students are leaving to Paris in a flight for a 10 day trip. One of the students Browning suddenly gets this intuitive feeling that the plane in which they are going to travel is going to crash in the sky and he is going to die in it. And so he creates a chaos in the flight by saying this feeling to his co passengers and quits the plane and along with him comes six other passengers. As told by browning the plane crashes immediately after its take off and the movie is all about how death chases all these seven people who escaped from the plane crash and how Alex Browning with his new theory of Death design tries to cheat death till the end?

Usually in such horror movies, the evil would be in the form of a psychopath, a dreadful animal or a ghost which causes death. But here in this movie, the death itself is the evil and we have no foreign elements to cause death, it takes different forms to make itself happen. What happens when a human has the ability to cheat this death and escape it? It is this premise and the concept that make the movie quite unique, different and interesting. The death design concept is something I have never heard before though I have read quite a few philosophy books.

The plane crashing dream sequence and the following moments are well done. The movie proceeds quite believably well just until one of the escapers (Tod) from the plane crash and a close friend of Alex Browning dies first. The way Tod dies is very artificial. I am not denying the probability of someone dying as it is shown in the movie but it is an extreme situation. Especially I didn’t like the way the writers have given a form to the arrival of death. In this movie death brings with it a volume of air to blow its arrival and a it produces a kind of darkening effect like how a shadow will fall if someone comes and stand behind us and above all the characters witnessing all these and becoming aware of that something is approaching them, makes everything look pretty ordinary like any other horror movie.

With a different and an interesting concept and premise like this, they would have worked out a better execution of Tod and Lewton’s death sequences. Terry and one more guy’s death are quite believable as it happens like an accident whereas Tod and lewton’s looks like a planned incident. And to the top of all, the way Alex escapes death in the climax is highly artificial. From the special features in the DVD, I came to know that this was not the original climax. Actually they shot it like Alex dying in the end but after test screenings, they came to know that people didn’t like Alex dying and they wanted Carter to die and hence they changed the climax to suit the audience taste. And this clearly shows in the highly artificial execution of the climax sequence. But somehow they made it all logical that after death skips Alex, it goes to Carter in its next cycle. Though I point out all this, even I wouldn’t prefer Alex dying at the end of the movie.

If you forget all this and keep your brains aside, the movie is a great thriller. There are quite a lot of moments which will just halt your heart beat for a second. Background score and brilliant cinematography plays a vital role in bringing these effects right at right moment in the movie. None of the characters register in our mind except Alex, Clear and Carter. The screenplay could have been done better. If they had thought of more natural ways of death with its thrilling moments intact, the movie would have been a cult classic.

Though flawed, I wouldn’t mind watching the movie again not for its content but for its entertainment value. I am eagerly waiting to watch Final Destinaion – 2 also a movie called “Seven” from the same crew.