Final Destination

Final Destination: Bloodlines released May 16, 2025 and is the sixth film in the franchise. Streaming service HBO Max (more recently known as Max before reverting to its original name) decided to stream all five of the previous films in case audiences wanted to watch or rewatch them before or after seeing the new movie. I’d never seen any of them, so I decided to give them a viewing.

To be honest, I had been avoiding the movies deliberately because death scares me, and I knew I’d have to look away during the gruesome bits. Fortunately, most of the movies are so over the top and ridiculous as to not even be scary to me. Each film follows the same premise. An accident causes a mass casualty event, a visionary has a premonition of it and helps a small group of survivors escape, and then Death starts killing each of the survivors one by one.

Final Destination (2000), which launched the film franchise, is probably my second least favorite of the original five. It features a plane crash as part of a terrorist attack, which became ominous in retrospect after the events of 9/11. It also feels a lot more like a B-horror movie or made for TV than its sequels do. It uses a grainy, washed-out look to the film and a neutral tone color palette (which were apparently deliberate decisions meant to invoke dread, except they didn’t fit the film aesthetic).

It also has a subplot about detectives believing the “visionary” in this film was involved in some kind of terrorist plot or is attempting to kill the remaining survivors out of “survivor’s guilt.” These sequences take us out of the action and were thankfully not repeated as plot points in the later films. The first film also made Death’s killings of its victims too supernatural, to the point that in the worst death scene, Death hides its trail of evidence to make it look like a suicide. Death also sometimes appears as a chilling wind or a spooky shadow, which is frankly corny.

On the positive side, the movie also introduced fun tropes specific to the franchise reused in the later films. These include an ominous song playing before the deaths. In this case, it was John Denver playing in the airport, which they joke is inappropriate given his dying in a plane crash a few years earlier, and then hearing him on the radio again before other deaths. Another is Death killing by Rube Goldberg device.

Final Destination 2 (2003) is a huge improvement on the franchise. It’s a direct sequel while the rest of the films are standalone sequels, but it makes several changes. It loses the horrible visual qualities. It also makes a brilliant move in killing off most of the new set of teens we’re introduced to (and honestly don’t care about) at the start of the movie and replaces them with a group of strangers from various backgrounds, the most diverse cast of any of the movies. The highway accident is also considered the most iconic opening sequence of the franchise.

Unfortunately, (spoiler alert) it also made a big mistake of killing off both remaining survivors from the first film. The first film establishes that if you save someone from Death, it skips to the next person in order, but the chain will start over again if not completely broken, and for some reason each of the films one through four also happens to have exactly three survivors left at the end, although some die off-screen. It also made up a new rule that if you die and come back to life, you cheat Death until your natural demise, although this unfortunately doesn’t get revisited in the later movies (until the newest one).

Final Destination 3 (2006) would have to be my favorite of the franchise. It made the best use of an ominous song foretelling death with the Bee Gee’s cover of the creepy stalker love song, “Turn Around, Look at Me.” It also starts off with a rollercoaster accident at a spooky carnival: the most sinister, less mundane of the opening sequences, and it added a cool idea (also, unfortunately not reused) of photographs taken at the carnival predicting how each character would die.

The third installment was also much more of a horror-comedy than just straight horror, and the humor made it easier to watch, as well as there was a fair bit more nudity and sex than the previous films. Something else it did differently that the other films is add a villainous human character as a kind of secondary antagonist to Death. It also features the coolest and most memorable death scenes of any of the movies. Unfortunately, they were also very predictable as well as bloody and gory. The biggest failing of the third film, though, is its cliffhanger ending.

The next film, pretentiously titled, The Final Destination (2009), also known as Final Destination 4, also known as Final Destination 3D (which should have been a warning sign, since it has multiple titles), is the worst of the franchise and was a flop. It’s as if they forgot the previous three films. It starts with strangers dying at a speedway. It also tragically dropped the practical effects of the previous films in exchange for really bad CGI, which was supposed to go along with the 3D effects, but just made every death scene look fake.

Even worse, the characters were mostly horrible and unintelligent, so I really didn’t care that they were all going to die. There was also strangely a lot of unnecessary racism and explicit nudity and sex. Also, the final death scenes happen as part of the credits and are very unsatisfying.

Final Destination 5, on the other hand, revived the franchise. It was also in 3D, but to much better effect. It also brought back a character from the first two films (William Bludworth, played by Tony Todd) to give the main characters a new rule: if you kill someone, you exchange their time on this Earth for yours. This is something I’d wondered about since the first movie. It also leads to something not tried in any of the previous movies: having a human antagonist actively trying to kill the other characters to prevent his own death.

The most shocking part of this movie is the (spoiler alert) twist ending that I did not see coming that the movie is actually a prequel taking place immediately before the first movie in the franchise. Unfortunately, that also means all the characters die.

My synopsis of the franchise would not be complete without seeing and reviewing the newest film, Final Destination: Bloodlines, so I finally went to the theater to see it, having finished my marathon of the others. It was a mixed bag.

It starts in the 1960s in a flashback to a disaster that was averted, taking the premise of the other films in a new direction. The movie is very heavily color-coded for some reason. The past is very gold and red with the visionary dressed in blue.

We then move to the present and find out that the visions have been passed on to the original survivor’s granddaughter, who we also see dressed in blue throughout most of the rest of the movie, except the funeral sequences. Death is also hunting the descendants of the survivors because they were never supposed to have existed (which seems to violate a very specific rule from the second film, but we’re just ignoring that).

The middle portion of the movie is colored green and orange. I’m not sure what that was supposed to represent other than that it’s summer and supposed to feel fun. The big problem is that a lot of the movie just wasn’t that fun. It’s much more a psychological thriller, which in a way returns to the roots of the first film in the franchise, and less a horror comedy in the way some of the previous movies were.

It does, however, have the best soundtrack of any of the movies, but they failed to reuse the trope of an ominous song playing before death scenes. In fact, Death gives practically no warnings before he strikes in this movie.

The death scenes, while definitely bloody, shocking, and horrific, are much less gory than the ones in the previous films. There is also no nudity or sex. It’s a strangely much more family-oriented horror film for the franchise, which fits the theme of the movie, but makes it stand out in comparison.

The worst part is (major spoiler) no one survives. It also broke the “three survivors” rule of previous movies for no apparent reason. It would have been a lot better and left room for a direct sequel if there had been a different ending.

The highlight of the film is, of course, the return of Tony Todd as William Bludworth, but he only appears briefly closer to the end. It was his final scene, since the actor was dying in real life, and they let him write his final lines.

Overall, just not a fan of the franchise. I hope that if they decide to make another one, they try to follow a consistent set of rules while also figuring out how to fix the problems of the previous films.