31 Days of Halloween - Day 11 - Movie 1

I've never seen any of the Final Destination franchise and decided that between today and tomorrow I'm going to watch the first four of them.

I was pleasantly surprised by Final Destination (2000). I hadn't expected much, but found myself pleasantly entertained throughout. About to embark on a school trip to Paris, Alex (Devon Sawa) has a detailed premonition of the plane's in air explosion. When events from his premonition starts to come true he tries to warn everyone, but his erratic behavior gets him and some of his fellow students and one teacher removed from the flight. The plane takes off killing everyone on board. It turns out that the force of death is one of predeterminism, and if you cheat death it will hunt you down and kill you by engaging super elaborate Rube Goldberg devices to make sure that you die like you are supposed to. It also kills in the order that the people who evaded it would have died had something else not intervened.

The movie is essentially a race against death's list of who dies next, and the bulk of the fun is seeing the intricate chains of trivial events that will lead to the demise of the characters as well as seeing if the characters can manage to escape these traps and cheat death yet again.

I've never been one to revel in body count movies, such as the Friday the 13th series, which substituted garden implements for the Rube Goldberg death traps. Mainly, this is because I find it boring to watch characters whose soul point is to get killed off, and are fleshed out accordingly. For whatever reason that didn't bother me here, and the characters are pretty slim on being realized beyond simple types. I found the bulk of the death scenes to be clever, and the game of trying to cheat death enough to keep me involved.