Final Destination meant something to a generation that could fear anything. After the ‘90s, it seemed the whole world could collapse around us at any moment. This anxiety has only since escalated and is, at its heart, central to why Final Destination is such an appealing prospect.
The villain is Death Itself, and it’s all around us, revealing itself in grand schemes and by way of the convoluted machinations of Rube Goldberg contraptions where anything that can go wrong will several times over.
This is keyed into a specific post-9/11 generational anxiety. We live in belief that it all might end at any moment. Maybe it’s a logging truck or maybe it’s a romantic dinner up on the Space Needle — Final Destination, as a franchise, realizes that our fear is irrational and so employs irrational devices to make it true.
That it went away for so many years is a bit wild, because it has such a convenient sales pitch. Death is coming for you. Easiest ticket ever sold.
So, where did we leave Final Destination? With an abysmal 3D effort that really shouldn’t be watched now and then with a recursive meta movie, wherein the ending so neatly wrapped up the original in a bow. Perhaps it went away because it gave us what horror so rarely does: a little closure. We’re back again, though, and it’s hard to be mad about it when death is this fun.
Back to the aforementioned Space Needle dinner. A couple sits for a romantic dinner and suddenly, a woman visualizes everything that could go wrong. So much can go wrong when you’re suspended in the air in a disc planted on a needle. Everything you can imagine going wrong, does, as the building structurally gives way bolt by bolt, glass floor dropping out, all manner of mayhem inside.
It’s a fun and very cg-exploitative scene but let’s emphasis the fun. It doesn’t look real and that’s fine. It’s good. It plays well to the series mechanics and this entry has a handful of notably grisly and well-defined deaths.
As a kill highlight reel, this fulfills an often lost function for the horror movie. It just gives us what we want and nothing much more. It’s not bloated with too many outside ideas. This is strictly paying homage to the concept of what Final Destination can be.
Sure, it goes into the trope-riddled modern horror movie mode of exploring generational trauma and how pain and death are linked, but only really as an excuse to cause some real chaos.
Bloodlines is, perhaps, the purest the series has ever been, focused exactly on why you’ve come to this franchise, and undeterred by much else, it simply works. A sufficiently good horror movie that understands itself and works in franchise. The film doesn’t go any further because it knows the limitations of what these films really ought to try and capture.
Yeah, it feels immediately dated, in some ways. The generational trauma angle, for one, has all the earmarks of this era of horror revivals, blandly looking in the rearview, trying to suggest that just as multiple generations have experienced these franchises, now the stories have that element, too.
There’s a fine art to the comeback horror film and it’s not an exact science. Sometimes the job is pure wish fulfillment, or nightmare fulfillment, in this case.
There are a few brutal moments which move the needle but the overarching film mostly also holds together just fine around the varied brutalities. When the proverbial shit hits the fan, and it always will, the pay-off makes for some ridiculous fun. The new film also features the final on-screen performance of Tony Todd, who gets a great last bit in a reoccurring role. If you’ve enjoyed any part of these movies in the past, Bloodlines cashes that check, and it’s just clean, bloody fun.