Well… as the title suggests, I went to watch said movie. In motherf*cking 3D, biatches! (Sorry, I just felt like saying it that way XD)
So, I’m gonna write a little bit about it. There may be spoilers. So ignore this entry completely if you don’t want to be spoiled. 
But, before I head on to the actual review/experience, there’s one thought I had… I found it hilarious that I was watching this movie on the anniversary of the ominous 9/11. Except, I’ll call it 11/9, because where I come from, we name the date from smallest to biggest, DD/MM/YY. And according to my English prof, Canada used to do it the same way before that happend. (*cue 9/11 jokes?) To furthermore quote (sorta) this genius, most of the world would refer to it as 11/9, if it wasn’t for America’s need to be in the spotlight and feel important. You’ve gotta admit, “9/11″ is a lot catchier than saying “September 11″ all the time…
But I’ll stop with this before I get any hatemail XD
On to the actual movie(s). Starting with a general plot summary for all movies.
For those of you who don’t know already, all Final Destination movie involve some sort of catastrophe that costs many lives (1: plane crash, 2: massive highway accident, 3: rollercoaster malfunction and the 3D movie: a Nascar crash resulting in the collapsing of the tribune in which the viewers sit). In all of these movies, there are a select few that survive because the leave the places of doom due to one of the protagonists foreseeing the event (kinda like deja-vu in a sense), freaking out, and thus causing a bunch of peeps to either leave voluntarily, getting kicked out, things like that. In addition, in 2 and this movie, the character in question has also visions of sorts relating to the death of the next person.
But, all movies have in common that ‘death’ supposedly has come to kill the survivors because they were on its list of people to die. And for all deaths there are signs of how they’ll happen, though they are vague and usually only make full sense in retrospective. Either way, once the survivors realize that their troubles aren’t over, they have to try and stick together to help each other live on, because only those involved can save another from death’s new plan for them.
Oh, and all movies involve the number 180 in one way or another. XD
(If that kind of movie is definitely not for you, you might not want to read on. Your choice.)
So… The Final Destination 3D…
I won’t give you the story summary, as you can find plenty of those around. Plus, I forgot the names already. XD
Anyways. The movie opens, as all others, with the main characters, and a little bit here and there about their personalities. The viewer, along with the character who’ll be the one responsible for a few people surviving, starts to see the signs of how there could be a catastrophe occuring. Oil running here, a screwdriver forgotten there, fence-screws slowly unscrewing under the pressure of the thundering cars running by… Many signs that one might want to leave this place, and fast.
And there it comes, the crash.
One girl’s head is smashed by the rapidly apporaching tire of a car that had been flipped (because it drove over the bent screwdriver that fell on the road and one tired bursted and the car flipped). The car itself also smashes into the audience (guess the fence was useless after all). Panic ensues, of course.
A redneck-nazi and his wive are split in half by the bonnet (if my dictionary translated that correctly) of the mentioned car, as it comes flying by like a frisbee. A mother (who is very memorable because she had had earlier forced her kids to stick tampons in their ears against the noise at the arena) is trampled on the stairs, and as she turns around, her broken teeth and bleeding showing, a flying car engines slams into her (still sitting on the stairs). What happened to her hubby and kids is not to be seen btw.
A guy and his sorta-girlfriend get squashed by falling concrete. I’m not sure what happened to the black security guy, I think he get’s squashed too. Or hit by an explosion. The boyfriend of the girl who got ‘tire’d’ (lawl) had stumbled and fallen backwards onto a piece of broken wood (from the bench), which pierced his head (and the tip came out his mouth). The guy and his girlfriend still try to escape. I think that’s when the explosion happened. Either way, she dies, and the shockwave blows him against a fallen piece of concrete, which conveniently has a piece of steel coming out that impales him.
*cue deja-vu zoom* He’s sitting there, with his friends, alive.
Now, that beginning seemed to have a lot more impact than the first. It was already more brutal (I think), and who knows how many peeps died this time… a lot of nameless victims, for sure.
Next is the opening credits, and here I think genius was at work. In this part, they showed all kinds of deaths that had happened in the 3 previous movies. But the showed it like an x-ray version, so you could see the damage to the bones etc that impaling, breaking, and squashing did. It was wicked and really impressive. And in 3D!
You don’t notice the whole 3D deal throughout the entire movie, but it’s definitely there when it counts. Even though I knew it was all animated, I still could help but instinctively try to move out of the way (or at least move in the spot from my seat ) when the screwdriver and other things came flying at me. I don’t think any other 3D movie has had such good an effect on me before. *ish happy*
Anyways, back @ the Nascar race, our Mr. Deja-vu is obviously starting to panic, as minor events unfold just as he had seen them (along with his death) minutes earlier. As to be expected, he, his friends, and a few involved leave the stadium. The redneck is pissed, many are irritated, the security guy wants to know just why something would have been going to happen, people are irritated, and so on.
The girl with the iPod, who, in the vision, got “tire’d” (still lawl), is being very pissy about why she’s missing out on the race, as suddenly a flying tire comes out of the stadium and runs right through her (though from the back this time). The group is about to freak over the body that is still twitching a little but now has smoosh for a head, as flames come out of the arena they left, and concrete starts to collapse, and major screaming and panic ensue.
Congratulations, you live! At least for now.
The usual stuff is going on, peeps meeting to honor the dead. The redneck speaks a warning to the black dude (who had previously stopped him from going back into the arena to fetch his wife).
That same evening, he appears on that man’s street, with a towtruck, quite obviously under influence of alcohol, ready to execute his lynch justice. Little did he know it wasn’t the black guy’s time to die yet, har har. (Meanwhile, the protagonist has a dream that hints towards what is going to follow.)
In quite the spectacular manner, the redneck managed to get his foot caught in the kerosin-drenched hook-chain of his towtruck, which is now tuckering down the street. Chain + Force + Asphalt = Sparks. Sparks + Kerosine = Flames. Ergo, the dude is slowly set on fire. And as the flames crawl up his leg, they also crawl the opposite direction, ultimately leading to the car blowing up and him with it. Plus, his head lands in the security dude’s yard.
Next on death’s list seems to be the mother. Being at the hairstylist after hours, we start to see lots of things that could kill her. The use of scizors while the chair keeps on randomly sinking down, the ventilator dangerously close to falling from the ceiling (and it eventually does), a can of hairspray slowly heating on a hair-straightener… There seem lots of fatal possibilities.
But, anyone who thinks that the styling will kill her is off. It’s indirectly her boys’ fault that she dies; they’d been chipping stones against a sign earlier, and a guy (who was smoking while he refilled his mower’s gastank, lawl) moving the public lawn drives right over the stone. Those who have one of those mowers (or even a normal one I guess) know how dangerous things can get when something’s caught in the blade. It comes as one might foresee, the rock is flung by the blades, and shoots through the mum’s right eye as if it were a bullet (and just when the ‘hero’ and his gf came to warn her, too).
Now, I thought that the whole rock-throwing business would kill the brats (they really were brats XD), which is why I anticpated them mum dieing in the salon and the brats similar to how she actually died. But it seems that the boys never died in the vision either, so it was not their turn at all. (I guess no matter how brutal, the director didn’t want to kill off any kids?) But yeah, dad and boys apparently would have survived either way. Hallelujah. Or something.
Sooo… being too late, our heroes are trying to help everyone else survive (did I mention his friend and her friend don’t believe all the speculation?). They had been able to convince Mr. Black (I apologize for not remembering any names and being too lazy to look for them XD) of their cause after he caught them snooping around the Nascar crashsite (so boy remembers who dies when, and boy saves the day) and heard them out.
Next they look for iPod girl’s bf. A guy who works in a workshop for customizing cars. He laments on how he should be by his girlfriends side, and that his job is so dangerous he could die any day anyways. As he’s talking to them through the (metal) fence, a car is ‘unwound’ from it’s current spot, and starts dashing backwards down the hill, almost squishing Mr. Mechanic.
He laughs it off (sorta like: “See, I coulda died right there. But I didn’t.” ) and walks back towards the garage. The previously mentioned car’s weight pulls on the chainrope long enough for it to break. Car hits fence, end of chain hits a propane bottle, propane bottle launches Mr. Mechanic into metal fence. There he is now, pieces of him falling through to the other side of the fence (and his colleague, whom you can see through the whole in the body, yelling if he was okay. lawl.)
Obviously panicked now, boy, girl, and Mr. Black try to find boy’s friend and girl’s friend. He envisioned their death to have something to do with water, but he couldn’t recall which one of them dies first, as they both got squashed together in his prediction earlier, so they split up, boy looking for his friend, the other two looking for the girl.
In short: girl almost drowns in the car-wash (that part was also in this movie’s trailer XD) because her sunroof had malfunctioned and various other things happened. Black rams his car into hers from the other side of the carwash, intervening and stopping her from getting her head swiped off (since it was now stuck out and dangerously close to the next swiper XD).
Meanwhile, the boy is at the pool, looking for his friend, not knowing that he, due to a series of unfortunate events, was stuck on the bottom of the pool, at the part where the water is drained. Before he can make out where the friend is, the pump literally pumps the life out of the blondie (pressure was building up with his bottom blocking the waterway, so the pump pumped harder). It rains guts and bloody water, and everybody vows not to visit that killerpool ever again. I admit, I was a tad restless, thinking of the next time I’d go to the pool. After all, all these ways to die may be spectacular, but they are all plasuible. Everything you see in those movies could happen. It just usually doesn’t.
One saved, one more lost. Blackie is getting all depressed, trying to hang himself (among other ways he tries to commit suicide). Since it doesn’t work, he (and boy and girl) believe the horror is over, and that they broke the ‘chain’. They celebrate. Woo yay.
A news report corrects our hero’s assumptions. In the hospital, there was ‘the man with the cowboy hat’, whom they had met at the stadium. In his vision, he had asked the man to move, but when reality hit, he was already so freaked that everything happened as he saw, he did not do the same. Thus, he did not realized that this man was part of the chain.
Now, some time had passed during which Black, boy, girl, and girl’s friend decided to live live to the fullest again. While Black and the boy try to find that cowboy, the girls are enjoying a trip to the mall.
As to be expected, the rescue comes to late. John Doe is crushed by a hospital bathtub falling through the ceiling from the room above. (I am not making this up XD) Black and boy walk outside, Black says: “[...] Deja-vus are God’s way of —”*smooosh* He gets run over by an ambulance. Which strangely enough adds up with the boy’s previous vision.
Our dear hero now knows that the horror isn’t over for him and the girls, and he dashes (/drives) to the mall to find them. Meanwhile, girlfriend has some weird ‘signs’ occuring, such as her shoelace getting caught in the escalator.
As she and her friend watch a movie, she realizes that the situation in the theater is almost exactly as that in the stadium. People say the same things, they are watching cars racing on the screen, things like that. The movie is a 3D movie, but the audience gets more than they bargained for. While they experience a 3D crash fire expanding in their direction, there’s actually a real fire that started behind the screen. Causing a real explosion.
But wait… deja-vu? Girlfriend suddenly realizes she had a vision. She’s sitting in the theater, urging her friend to leave with her. The boyfriend arrives and she runs out with with him in time, as the explosion occurs and her friend, still sitting in the seat, get impaled by a flying piece of wood.
With more explosions to follow, the whole mall is in uproar (understandably). Like lemmings they flee the area, to the extend that they cause the escalators to level down like dominoes. Sorta. People fall off, get trampled, panic everywhere.
Boy and girl’s escalator too had dropped a level, leaving them to approach the machinery that keeps the escalator move the way it does. Girlfriend gets caught in the machinery with her foot, he tries to pull her out. Bones crack, flesh and blood squirt. Eventually she’s caught so deep in the apparatus that both she and the escalator movement die. (I forget if and how he dies…)
Yo dawg, so I heard you like deja-vus, so I put a deja-vu in your deja-vu, so you can enjoy having one while you have one. (<<<xzibit fail XD)
That’s right ladies and gents, the death of his girlfriend was but another vision! In fact, we’re back at the point where Black dies. This time, he wastes no time to check on the guy (since he knows it’s pointless), but instead races towards the mall.
One might think that now, since he knows which theater his girl is in and all, he’d dash for her and get her out, but he does the heroic and tries to stop the fire from spreading. He get’s pinned against a column by a nailgun btw. But he lives, and extinguishes the fire, in return saving many lives that day.
A considerable amount of time passes as we see the boy, the girl, and the girl’s friend together in the cafe they always used to sit. At the same table they usually sit. (Did I mention there was a blue bus with a 180 passing him before he entered the coffee shop – which is interestingly enough called “Death by Caffeine” ?)
So our hero begins to ponder… what if there wasn’t a plan? Or what if the plan had been the 3 of them sitting at this table, on the very day at the very time, all along? It doesn’t help that he sees reminders of the previous events everywhere around him (an ad for the pool, the movie poster on a magazine, etc.). And just before he manages to freak the other two out again…
… a truck runs into the shop and kills them.
(It was evading and ended up hitting the shop instead.) But, we don’t see the actors crushed or anything, instead the movie switches to that x-ray like design we had with the opening credits. We see the bones of the girl’s friend getting crushed under the truck’s tire (took that heavy thing quite a while to stop). The girl was pushed by the truck’s nose, and the immensity of the impact threw her against a wall, where her head twisted in a way that broke the neck. Lastly, the boyfriend got thrown against the wall, where he banged his chin pretty bad before he fell on the floor, bleeding (and with fewer teeth).
Now the last part happened unexpectedly fast, so I didn’t quite catch why/how he died. Not that I think it’s harmless to be smashed against the wall like that.
Either way, the movie had a conclusion and yet it had none. I was kinda hoping to get more open ends connected, like why the mortician seemingly knew so much (in 1 & 2), and how exactly “new life defeats death”. But, nonetheless, as brutal as it was, the ending also seemed very fitting.
It’s kinda too bad that there won’t be any more of those. They really outdid themselves in both sheer brutality and methods of death this time. (Perhaps that’s why… they’re out of ideas? XD)
Now, watching movies like this DOES make me more away of dangers and ways to die, though I would by no means call myself a paranoid. But, they also make me think of all the things I wanna do and shouldn’t put off. Bucket-list reference here.
It’s a subtle moral lesson I guess.
~ ~ ~ After watching this movie, I felt slightly unsettled. It was a feeling close to when you know you’re going to throw up, though I knew I wouldn’t. I was kinda shaken inside, and it felt, even as I left the building and walked into the sun, as if there was some sort of shadow cast over me.
I’m not one of these people who believe that watching “The Ring” will kill you and that sort of thing. As a matter of fact, I don’t think so much that that nervousness came from watching the movie, but more of an inner, subconscious epiphany. And perhaps the desire to have a slightly more explanative ending… (but the latter is pure speculation )
I don’t know anyone else who watched the movie, so I didn’t really have the chance to discuss it with anyone yet. And did I mention I was the only one watching it in that theater at that time? And there I’d been looking forward to hearing people shriek and all that… But it was just me.
I didn’t shriek btw. Honest. XD
~ ~ ~
This entry is filed under ‘Retrospectively Recapped’ - a category that I will only apply to entries that are not written on the very same they they appear as posted. I recognize this category as an important one to emphasize that, when I go over events that are no longer fresh in my mind, I am certain to leave out things or value issues differently. I’m sure it’ll somehow show in my writing too; whether or not I have recapped something.
