John Stanley
WHEN
DEATH IS CHEATED,
GET READY FOR YOUR. . .
This crazy business about flying off into the wild blue yonder on an airliner, it's one of those necessary evils of life that always follows the same pattern, at least for me. And I suspect for you -- or any prudent person who allows his body to be moved around thousands of feet above the surface of the earth.
I worry just more than a little bit at
the airport as I climb aboard, wondering is this going to be
one of those rare one-in-a-thousand flights that goes down .
. . or is it going to be an uneventful take-off, flight and landing?
I finally succeed in shoving these disturbing thoughts aside
and settling down for what has always been, until now, thank
God, a routine trip. But then there's always a mild sense of
elation, and a slightly more
ecstatic
sense of relief, when the landing is over and I'm at last on
my way--with my feet happily back on the ground.
I really got to thinking about this idea
of putting your fortune into the hands of something else--call
it fate, call it destiny, call it God's will--when my friend
Dennis and his girlfriend Sarah flew to Puerto Villarta earlier
this year. They had only been back a week when I heard on a flash
TV news report that an Alaskan jetliner returning from that same
Mexican resort area to San Francisco had crashed off the coast
of Los Angeles. I immediately called Dennis and he told me that
was the exact same flight (same number, same flight path, maybe
even the same plane) he and Sarah had taken to return home on
the previous Monday. And we started talking about fate, and destiny,
and God's will, and all the cliches, including "What if
I had postponed my trip by one week?" or "What if I
had decided to stay a week longer?" or "Well, when
it's your time to go . . ." and "If it was meant to
be . . . " A lot of "what if" stuff.
I tell you all this "what if" stuff because I just
saw a movie that deals with a lot of the "what if"
stuff Dennis and I talked about that fateful day the Alaskan
airliner went down. Granted, "Final Destination" was
intended to be a horror-film entertainment, mainly for the younger
audiences that frequent slasher movies like "Scream"
and "I Know What You Did Last Summer," since this movie
copies some of the formulae. Myself, I had gone to the movie
with heightened expectations because its director, James Wong,
and his co-writer Glen Morgan had worked on "The X-Files"
during the show's early seasons and the team made major contributions
to the way that series developed and became popular.
But I got something I hadn't bargained for during the first 20 minutes--something that made me feel very I-wish-I-wasn't-here, which is not what I'm hoping for when I go to the movies. A sense of deja vu fell over me as I watched teenager Devon Sawa prepare for a flight to Paris with a group of students from his Long Island high school. I couldn't help but remember TWA Flight 800. That was a real airplane that was carrying students intending to vacation in Paris.
I was already feeling uncomfortable just as Sawa was feeling uncomfortable, especially when his father remarks, "You've got your whole life ahead of you." as he's preparing to leave home. At the airport Sawa experiences subtle little disturbances that make him hesitant about getting into the aircraft. Reluctantly he does go aboard. Then the little gizmo that keeps his tray table in an upright position snaps off, and now he's sweating and gulping mouthfuls of air.
And then, finally strapped in his seat, he dreams that the aircraft catches fire during takeoff and everyone is roasted like marshmallows within a giant fireball. So when Sawa snaps awake he goes absolutely bonkers, rushing to get off the aircraft. He makes such a disruption that he and six others are removed from the plane, and it takes off for Paris without them.
As you may have already shrewdly concluded, the jetliner never reaches Paris--it explodes as the teenagers watch it through the airport window. Just like on TWA Flight 800, everyone on board is killed. Up to this moment "Final Destination" has remained rooted in reality--a situation those of us who fly can relate to, and sympathize with. So far we might even say "Final Destination" is a movie about extrasensory perception. You know the "sixth sense" stories, in which people claim they've had dreams, visions or precognizant knowledge that some horrible disaster was about to take place? Sometimes these stories are nothing more than "urban legends" because they cannot be documented. However, some have been documented.
One of the most famous, and I retell it because it relates to this movie, is the story of David Booth of Cincinnati. In late May, 1979, he had a recurring dream of a jetliner losing an engine, rolling over to the right and plummeting into the airport tarmac below. Booth said he awoke from these dreams with a sense of terror that he could not shake off for the rest of the day. On May 24, when he could no longer ignore the nightmare that was coming back night after night, he told Paul Williams of the Federal Aviation Administration his story. Based on Booth's description, Williams concluded that the plane described was a DC-10. On the morning of the very next day, May 25, a DC-10 taking off from Chicago lost an engine, banked to the right and crashed into the ground, killing all 273 people on board.
There's also the classic story of Eva Hart, who was seven years old when she walked aboard the Titanic with her mother and father. According to Eva's accounts, her mother argued for days prior to boarding, trying to convince her husband that something awful was going to happen to the ship. When he refused to listen to her, she reluctantly agreed to join him on the Transatlantic cruise, although Eva remembers that she remained apprehensive and kept warmly dressed every night of the voyage, as if to be prepared for the disaster she knew was coming. Eva and her mother survived, but Eva's father did not. So the stories go.
And so "Final Destination" goes, appearing to be a movie about precognition, about ESP. Using TWA Flight 800 as its inspiration. However, in the aftermath of the crash, the film makes a swerving deviation from the world of parapsychology into the world of movie horror.
For now the six surviving teen-agers are
stalked. Not by a killer in a hockey mask, not by a homicidal
fisherman in a slicker, not by a psycho in a slouch hat who needs
a manicure. With the help of creepy mortician Tony Todd, who
played the boogeyman monster in the "Candyman" movies,
two of the survivors--Sawa and his girlfriend, Ali 
Larter--figure out that Death is stalking
them, returning to claim the lives that were rightfully his at
the time of the plane crash.
This is not the handsome personification of "Death Takes a Holiday," this is an invisible, angry energy force that causes things to happen in a Rube Goldberg fashion. Object A mysteriously moves and strikes against Object B, which causes Object C to drop down on Object D which then ignites Object E, which then sets off Object F, and so on until the human involved has been (1) strangled to death, (2) burned to death, (3) decapitated and (4) never mind, it's too horrible to write about.
Wong and Morgan have brought a lot of style to this movie and the death traps are cleverly edited to heighten the suspense and terror of it all, as the surviving teenagers die one by one. So cinematically they've done their stuff.
But I never quite got past being troubled by the use of an airliner disaster to motivate a horror movie plot--that queasy, uneasy feeling I felt during the first 20 minutes never fully went away. In fact, it came back in full force when "Final Destination" shows the kids in a car stalled at a railroad crossing. The driver, one of the survivors, wants to prove that he's in charge of his own destiny, or some such nonsense, as a train is swiftly approaching. I guess I've read too many real-life stories about stalled cars at railroad tracks or school buses that didn't make it across when they were full of adolescent kids on their way home, because I didn't enjoy this scene either, and almost wanted to leave the theater at that point.
In short, I could never quite fully enjoy this movie the way I wanted to. In a way I have to congratulate the filmmakers for tapping so significantly into my personal phobias and apprehensions about airliners and railroad crossings. I guess visceral movie making is what it's supposed to be about in the 21st Century. Movies are often about the tragedies of life, but when spin-offs of real-life disasters are used to motivate a horror movie, and an exploitation horror movie at that, I have a very difficult time reconciling the whole thing. I suspect a lot of people feel the same way as I do, and I suspect it could ultimately have an affect on the box office for "Final Destination."
One other thing I forgot to tell you. I was one of three people in the audience on a Friday afternoon. Maybe that tells you all you need to know.
© 2000 by John Stanley
LET JOHN STANLEY AND THE REST OF US KNOW WHAT YOU THINK OF THIS COLUMN. SEND US YOUR E-MAILS AT talkback@thecolumnists.com
| Home | About Us | Archives | Talkback | Shopping Mall |
Want to sponsor this page? Call 650-949-5573 about the sponsorship program for TheColumnists.com.