Can You Feel That On the Wind?

We discussed Final Destination: Bloodlines last time. It’s a decent film, a pretty good horror movie, and one of the better films in the Final DestinationA series of films predicated on Rube Goldberg-levels of slasher murder, the Final Destination series has gone five films (and counting) to become one of modern horror's more successful franchises. series. It’s not a perfect film, having some fairly major flaws that I struggled to get my mind around. I alluded to those flaws in my main review, but I also wanted to avoid spoilers just because the film has only been out a few months, just recently came to streaming, and it’s entirely possible there are people out there that wanted to see it and haven’t yet. I was one of them. So no spoilers on that review because that’s just common courtesy.

There’s no common courtesy here, though. If you’re here it’s because you want to talk spoilers, and I have a couple of them I really want to address. So let’s get into it.

The End of the Film

My biggest complaint comes at the very end of the movie, which meant I really didn’t want to spoil it for anyone that is a fan of the series but who hasn’t seen the sixth film yet. It is, however, a flaw that many of the films share, so it shouldn’t be that big a surprise. If you’ve seen any of the movies you know what to expect, and it’s honestly one of the major reasons that I don’t like these films anywhere near as much as other slasher movies: the films, Final Destination: Bloodlines included, have a habit of killing all the characters by the time the credits roll.

It started with the original Final Destination, all because the test audiences didn’t like the original, happy ending the film got. They wanted certain people to die, so the writers mapped a new ending, the crew shot it quick, and the film ended up going with a scene where Death doesn’t give up its quest to kill everyone in the film, it just starts the kill loop all over again, taking out asshole character Carter, with the implication that everyone else that survived the first round is next. The third film kills the heroine, her boyfriend, and her sister (all the survivors) in the last scene in a subway. The fourth film kills the final three friends at a cafe when a truck plows into the building. The fifth film kills the two survivors on their trip to France by replicating the opening scene of the first film, so you know they’re very dead. This is the pattern, so I really shouldn’t have expected otherwise, but still….

It’s only the second film where some of the characters survive, but even then it’s implied that the death loop starts once again… and I seem to recall that the third film killed the survivors of the second film via some news clips about an accident. So yeah, everyone dies. Hurray!

Naturally, then, you have to expect that the two survivors of the sixth film, Stefani and Charlie, die in the last scene of the movie. This is caused by what can only be called the unluckiest penny ever, which was involved, in part, in the mass casualty event in 1969 that kicked off the whole path of the film. Or it would have been if Stefani’s grandmother, Iris, hadn’t had a premonition about the event and stopped it from happening, partially by taking the penny from a kid that would have thrown it, starting the whole mess.

That penny was then carried around in a “death book” by Iris for decades until she passed the book to Stefani. The penny then dropped out of the book, was picked up by an old woman, dropped by her later, and it then rolled along until it, quite improbably, caused a massive train derailment that takes out most of a neighborhood and then, eventually causes Stefani and Charlie to die when they are each crushed by timber from the train. It’s a lot, and it feels like a lot when it happens right at the end of the film.

I hate it when slasher films kill all the characters. The whole point of a slasher is to see this group of people get whittled down, little by little, until one or two people (usually a Final Girl, although sometimes someone else gets to come along for the ride) survive the whole long chain of events. They get past the murderer, they outsmart the puzzles, they win the day. You need someone to win so that it feels like the whole mess of murder and mayhem meant something. If everyone dies then there is no point in watching the whole film. When all the characters die that means all the time you invested in them was worth nothing. You’d get the same effect not watching them at all because, in both cases, there’s no return on investment. You want them, need them to survive, this film, this time, to make it have value to you.

Now, sure, they can go and die in a sequel, and that’s fine. They did their part of the story, so they can pass their survivor status on to the next person in the chain, and that person can then go be the Final Girl in their movie and continue the chain onwards. Films like ScreamWhat started as a meta-commentary on slasher media became just another slasher series in its own right, the Scream series then reinvented itself as a meta-commentary on meta-commentary. understand this, which is why certain characters keep surviving, film to film. You are invested in them and if the movies killed all the characters, you’d stop being invested. That’s always been the flaw of the Final Destination films since they don’t have that “carry it forward” aspect. I hoped things would be different in this meta-reboot of the franchise, but Final Destination: Bloodlines falls into the same pattern as all the previous films, and it sucks.

The Long History of Death

It sucks even more here because not only does the deaths of Stefani and Charlie undercut their own happy ending, with them being the sole survivors of their family tree, but there’s even more weight put on their deaths because they were the sole survivors of over 60 years of mayhem. Remember, the opening of the film sees hundreds of people die at the Sky View restaurant before Iris intervenes and saves them all. Her intervention sets Death on its path and, over the years, the entity not only kills every person that survived at the restaurant, it kills all their children, grandchildren, and anyone else in their line that “shouldn’t have been born” if the Sky View had fallen apart with all of them in it.

Put another way, had Stefani and Charlie survived it means they would have been living for hundreds, maybe thousands of people. There was a legacy for them, an onus on them to survive the long path of death because of how many people died. Killing them kills 60 years of efforts to defy Death. It’s not just a simple reset of the death counter like every other film in the series. There was a lot more weight and impact on these two surviving than the series had ever had before… and then they die, because the series can’t help itself.

And don’t get me wrong, the death sequence is creative, sure. Improbable, but creative. The train derailment really couldn’t have happened that way, not from a penny, but the fact is that it’s a really well plotted sequence that was hinted at, time and again, throughout the film. It’s executed well, and the end result is impressively gory. That doesn’t make it right, though, and it really does lessen everything about the film leading up to the end. Sure, I could go back and watch the good deaths again (and many of them are good), but I won’t care nearly as much on a second viewing because I know it’s all for naught. The heroes die, there’s no reason to give a shit at all.

The Damn Penny

The penny being the culprit is pretty funny, though. The penny originally was thrown by an asshole little shit of a kid off the tower, and it then gets sucked in the ventilation system. It causes the system to break, tears open a gas pipe, and that helps to set the whole building on fire. Iris taking the penny didn’t stop its destructive power, it just delayed it for six decades. It still got its revenge, so to speak, finishing the job it was supposed to start all those years ago.

I like the irony of that, and the idea that death would be so creative as to use this one item, waiting for sixty years (give or take) to finalize its plan. Even Iris couldn’t see that coming, and she saw almost everything.

The Death Book

The characters in the film call it “Gam-gam’s Death Book”, and that’s really what it is. For sixty years Iris paid attention to every little sign, every breeze on the wind, any single item that seemed out of place, and she wrote it all down in her book. It was a tome that could be used to predict everything that would come, from the first death in the film to the last, and, well, that’s kind of weird, right? In the series you get a premonition, but you don’t then get more of them, or see multiple signs, or are able to predict things far off in the future. Sure, when death came back for a second loop in the first film the hero there started to suspect the loop was starting again right before it did, but that’s not a common occurrence in this series. Iris having a tome of prediction is new, and it really messes with the mythology.

It then makes you wonder, where are these promonitions coming from. As I alluded to in my main review, the implication of Iris having the first premonition, then being able to write a book predicting more, all before her vision of that first incident passes on to Stefani shows there’s some force or plan at play guiding all of this. The question is if it’s a good force or a bad force that causes these visions.

If it’s a guardian angel-type, trying to protect people and save lives, well, it’s kind of shitty at its job. It saves people for a bit, sure, but then Death comes calling and the people quickly all get bumped off again. The sixth film lets people survive for a while, sometimes decades, but Death still comes for them all, and everyone related to them, too. You would think that if a protective force was working against Death, was trying to protect and save people, it would help them along so that all the people saved (or, at least, a good portion of them) could survive Death later as well, but that generally doesn’t happen. Iris gets the closest, putting off the deaths of all of her family for a time, but even she fails in the end, so what was the point of any of it?

But if the premonitions come from a bad force, maybe Death itself, what does that mean? Is this all a game, then, and Death is having fun letting people live a little longer? Letting them build up fear, anxiety, stress, all while the Reaper slowly closes in. It’s an interesting thought, but considering everyone in the films, this one includes, says that you can’t mess with Death’s game, that it always comes for everyone it misses, that implies then that Death doesn’t have any part in the premonitions, it just comes back to clean up a mess someone else made.

I really wish the films could address all this better. Iris and her book raise more questions than the film can answer, and I doubt another film is going to be able to handle it any better. This was the film, with its long setup and deeper mythology, that could have given us some much needed answers, which would have been answers to questions this film raises all on its own… but it doesn’t, which is deeply annoying.

Where Does the Series Go From Here?

Finally, we have to address the fact that this film was successful and there’s already talks of another film getting into development. But can a seventh Final Destination movie really match the power of this one. You can’t pull off the same tricks twice, which is a lesson the previous films all proved with their endless iterating on the same ideas over and over. Final Destination: Bloodlines at least had a new hook and a creative idea on how to handle things. But now that this film has passed you can’t just have another film with 60 years of Death stalking people while a crazy old woman writes a “Death Book” for her family to follow to try and escape (which, in the end, they won’t anyway, of course).

But say you have this “Death Book” get handed off to someone else. Well, that really doesn’t make sense either. The book was written by Iris for her family, so anyone else that got it wouldn’t have nearly the connection to the storyline behind the book as our characters did here. It would just be a random book of crazy lady ravings that, somehow, come true. That isn’t nearly as interesting.

Plus, would the book even work for anyone else? Her predictions were all based on the path of Death she was on, with events related to everyone she saved and how they were going to die. Outside that line of Death, would the book actually be able to predict anything? I’m sure the writers would say, “yes,” but it’s a McGuffin that works in context and would need way too much explaining if it were transplanted into another film. I don’t think passing “Gam-Gam’s Death Book” on to another group of survivors would work at all.

And so we’re back to square one with a series that can sometimes rise above and deliver pretty good thrills, but which, creatively, will likely be bankrupt once more. You can’t recycle this plotline, but without a story like this what do you have? People having a vision and somehow surviving for a little while until Death inevitably wins. We’ve seen that film before. Six times, in fact. I’m just not certain continuing this series past Final Destination: Bloodlines is really a good idea.

Again I like this film for what it is, even if it’s not perfect. I do wish it were better and that it could resist its own worse impulses. Hell, if they’d kept Stefani alive they could have used her to carry the “Death Book” on into the next film. Instead the film killed her, like it kills everyone else that survives, and the cycle repeats itself. Now we get to see if the seventh film will just be another retread like almost all the rest…