By: Cameron Tyo
April 27th, 2025
Warning: There will be what some people consider major spoilers for the movie The Final Destination
As the weeks go on, the release of Final Destination: Bloodlines creeps up ever so slightly, and as we reach that point, my journey of watching all of the Final Destination movies for the first time continues. We are nearing the end of this journey as we reach the penultimate title of the series so far, with The Final Destination released in 2009.
If you’ve watched any Final Destination movies, then the premise of this one should feel very similar.
In this movie, Nick O’Brannon (Bobby Campo) gets a premonition of a racecar crash that sends tires and other equipment flying into the spectator’s stands, slicing and dicing people, most of those deaths being shown utilizing some hilariously awful CGI. This, along with the structure of the deteriorating racetrack falling on tons of people, kills a lot of Nick‘sfriends. Nick warns his friends about the chaos that might ensue, causing others around him to panic and/or question him, leading people to get kicked out of the event, preventing their deaths.
Then death plays its role and makes sure its design stays intact by killing everyone who was supposed to die at the race in brutal ways.
The first premonition scene in this movie is probably the worst of all the movies I’ve seen, and I believe that has to do with the directors trying their hand with 3D for the first time. Trying to create such 3D effects with CGI caused a lot of people to look as if they were dying in strange ways. Or the deaths just looked unnatural. The way the body would lay limp looked as if it was done by computer. Because of this, even things that were done naturally to cause certain effects looked bad even if it wasn’t CGI. This occurred several times throughout the movie.
The whole CGI not working out well compared to the fact that this movie has some of the most bare-bone characters to exist in a franchise whose characters already don’t have that much personality as expected for the series leads to what I believe is the worst movie in the franchise out of the ones I’ve seen. We find out that Nick’s girlfriend is Lori Milligan (Shantel VanSanten) and their friends are Hunt Wynorski (Nick Zano) and Janet Cunningham (Hayley Webb). We know one trait of each person, and that is essentially it. In fact, most of the characters who end up escaping death and dying earlier in the film don’t get names, or if they did, I forgot because names are barely mentioned in the film. Nor do we find out any history about most of these characters. Because of this, lots of the deaths don’t seem impactful and just sort of happen. Without an identity or, heck, even a name for a face death, in my eyes, it is just happening to a random person.
This is also the first movie where nothing unique happens in the film. Every event or scenario, excluding how people died, seems to be rehashed from earlier films.
I was actually entertained by the movie, but only because during the movie, I was thinking in my head about how stupid some of the deaths were or how convenient things were to cause some of the deaths. I think one of the most unnatural deaths was that of Jonathan Groves (Jackson Walker), who got squashed by a tub that fell from the second floor of a hospital due to a negligent employee not turning off a tub that was already full at the beginning of the scene. Like, that whole death scenario seemed bullshit. As I already mentioned, a lot of deaths utilized 3D, which caused a lot of deaths to look obviously fake, which made me smirk.
Really, the only thing I sort of liked about the film was the character of George Lanter (Mykelti Williamson) and the interactions he had with different people throughout the movie. I also thought Nick’s whole second premonition of the mall movie theater incident and the scene that accompanied it were more suspenseful and fun to watch than the first, which is odd to say. You’d think it’d be the other way around, and I think it could’ve been if less CGI was used to create the 3D vibe the movie was going for during the whole Mckinley race crash.
Overall, I don’t have anything to add. As of right now, The Final Destination is by far the weakest entry of the series for a myriad of reasons. The CGI, barebone characters, and the fact that nothing narratively unique happens like in previous entries create a very lackluster viewing experience, even for the Final Destination series, where expectations aren’t high. However, I will continue my journey in hopes that the fifth entry is better.
But with that being said, my rankings of the movies so far go:
1. Final Destination 3
2. Final Destination 2
3. Final Destination
4. The Final Destination