Final Destination

Final Destination is also the name of a stage in the video game Super Smash Bros. Melee.

Final Destination is a 2000 horror film. Loosely based on the crash of TWA Flight 800 (which acts as a startout point for the rest of the film), the plot was based on an unused X-Files episode. Notably the director James Wong acted as a writer, producer and director of the series. The DVD of Final Destination was released on September 26th, 2000.

The film was the first in the Final Destination trilogy, and was followed by Final Destination 2 (2003) and by Final Destination 3 (2006). Distributed by New Line Cinema, it was directed by James Wong.

This movie also spawned a series of related novels, the Final Destination books.

Plot

On his way to a class trip to Paris, Alex Browning (played by Devon Sawa), has a vision that the airplane is going to explode after takeoff. He, along with a teacher and several students, are kicked off the plane. They soon witness the plane exploding right after takeoff, but they are now all stuck in a new vision as Death sets out to claim them once and for all.

Cast & Characters

Alex Chance Browning (Devon Sawa): Alex, the main character, has a premonition that Flight 180 will explode. Making a scene before take-off, he and six other people get off the plane and witness the disaster.
Clear Rivers (Ali Larter): Clear was not very talkative and open with people, but she felt some sort of connection with Alex at the airport. She believed Alex's premonition and curiously followed him off the airplane to discover that Alex was correct. She at first does not believe the concept of Death's design, but eventually does. Clear falls in love with Alex.
Carter Horton (Kerr Smith): Carter is a jerk who resents Alex throughout the film, thinking that he is some sort of freak. We are also led to believe Alex and Carter were not friendly even before Flight 180. He gets kicked off Flight 180 for fighting with Alex after Alex's premonition makes him cause a commotion about how the airplane is going to explode.
William Bludworth (Tony Todd): After Tod's death, Clear and Alex want to examine his body at the morgue. They meet a very mysterious mortician who tells them about Death and its design. Alex takes this information and uses it to prevent future deaths.
Valerie Lewton (Kristen Cloke): One of the teachers on Flight 180. When Alex and Carter fight on the plane, she and another teacher get off to settle the two students. Finding out that Alex, Carter, and Billy got kicked off the plane, Ms. Lewton tells the other teacher to go back while she stays behind and catches a later flight. When Flight 180 explodes, she becomes very depressed and wants to move - away from the memories and also because she feels she sent the other teacher to his death by telling him to get on the plane. She resents Alex, thinking him as some sort of witch.
Billy Hitchcock (Sean William Scott): On Flight 180, Billy was unlucky enough to get in the middle of Carter's and Alex's fight and got kicked off. He is the jokester of the group, but not really friends with anyone.
Terry Chaney (Amanda Detmer): Carter's girlfriend. A girl much kinder than her significant other who tried to break up Alex and Carter. She gets off Flight 180, because Carter got off.
Tod Waggner (Chad E. Donella): Alex's best friend. When Alex gets off the plane, Tod's brother, George, tells him to accompany Alex. George dies on the plane, and Tod's father somehow blames Alex for the crash and Tod's friendship with Alex is strained.
Agent Weine (Daniel Roebuck): Investigating the Flight 180 case. He follows Alex around, thinking that Alex might have had something to do with Flight 180's explosion and the deaths afterwards.
Agent Schreck (Roger Guenveur Smith): Agent Weine's partner.

Deaths

Death's original design is Tod, Terry, Ms. Lewton, Carter, Billy, Clear, Alex. The order in which they actually die is different because some get saved and moved to the end of the order. The actual order of death is as follows:

Tod Waggner

Death: Strangulation. First, a gust of wind blows through an open window and shuts the door to the bathroom while Tod is in it, so as to minimize intervention. Water leaks out of a poorly screwed pipe in the back of his toilet, creating a puddle that he does not notice while grooming himself in the bathroom and is listening to the radio. He then walks over to the tub and slips on the puddle, causing him to fall on a clothesline cord, which snaps off the wall and, pulled by the velocity of Tod's fall, wraps around his neck and strangles him in the tub, while he struggles to stand up, but only manages to kick over bottles of shampoo and soap, spilling them inside the tub and making it slippery and preventing him from getting to his feet. Upon his death, the water snakes its way back under the toilet and disappears as if it never leaked.

Terry Chaney

Death: Car accident. Terry stops in the middle of the street, cursing at Carter for always fighting with Alex, when a speeding bus hits her, splattering her blood on the others. Ironically just before the impact, she tells Carter if he was going to get into fights with Alex everytime he saw him, that they could "both just drop f***ing dead." before turning into the oncoming bus.

Ms. Valerie Lewton

Death: Stabbing. She suffers the most violent and longest death. Edgy with nerves, Ms. Lewton decides to make a cup of tea. She sees the shadowy figure of death in the metal of the teapot, and becomes freaked out. Changing her mind, not thinking due to nerves, Ms. Lewton pours ice-cold vodka into a hot mug, causing the mug to crack. She then inadvertently holds it over her computer monitor, causing the liquid to leak into the monitor and spark the inside. When she sees the smoke, she goes to check on the monitor, which explodes, blowing a piece of glass from the screen into her throat. She pulls it out and attempts to hold the blood in. Meanwhile, the spilled vodka on the counter catches fire and eventually lights up the whole kitchen. She is weakened by her loss of blood and falls to the floor in her kitchen, and attempts to grab a cloth draped over a knife block. She pulls the cloth, thereby pulling down the knife block and causing a huge butcher knife to fall into her chest. At this point, Alex has entered the house to try and save her, but just as he reaches her, the stove explodes and a chair falls onto the knife, lodging it into Ms. Lewton, and killing her. The gas from the stove, among other things, is caught in the fire and the entire house explodes right after Alex comes running out of it.

Carter Horton

Death (intervened): Train accident. Carter drives his car onto railroad tracks to prove that death does not have a pattern. When the train comes, he calmly proceeds to get out of the car, only to realize that the car is stuck in the locked position. Alex breaks the car window and pulls him out of the car just in time.

Billy Hitchcock

Death: Decapitation. Carter's car is smashed by a speeding train immediately after Alex pulls him from it, sending pieces of metal everywhere. While Billy is standing screaming at Carter that he was next and that he is not staying around him, a sharp piece of metal is whipped up and out by a chain dangling down from the speeding train, sending it flying through Billy's head as he is turning around, cutting off the top half of his head, killing him instantly.

Carter Horton

Death: Blunt force trauma. Six months later, after Death's list was fully ran through, Clear, Alex, and Carter have finally got to Paris and are at a café. The long absence of close calls have led them to believe that all three had been skipped, and they can now have a chance at a full life. Alex is still pondering the chance of Death going after them again, but Carter assures him that as long as Alex is alive, Carter and Clear would be fine. Alex gets a feeling that something is about to happen (from signs such as a busker across the street playing Rocky Mountain High), and leaves the restaurant quickly, not wanting to endanger the others. As he's crossing the street, a passing bus swerves to avoid him and runs into a street lamp, which is knocked out of the ground and hits a large illuminated sign above the café, knocking it off its standpoint and causing it to swing towards Alex back on the ground. Carter pushes Alex out of the way just as the sign swings past him, saving him. As Carter stands up to wonder who is next in the design, the sign swings back across the street directly behind him, but the film cuts away to credits right before the audience sees Carter smashed by the sign.

Alex Browning

Death: Head trauma. Since Carter saved Alex from death, Alex was skipped and put after Clear on Death's list. Alex and Clear do not die in this film, but Alex dies in between Final Destination and Final Destination 2. According to the sequel, Alex is killed in an alley by a falling brick that was pushed by a gust of wind.

Note: Again, Alex did not die in this film, but his death was not a major plot to the sequel, as it was mentioned only briefly. Since he died shortly after Carter, it makes sense to include his death for this film page. In an alternate ending, Alex actually dies saving Clear; he is electrocuted and then burned to death. Additionally, there was a scene filmed where Alex is decapitated by a stray rudder from a downed police helicopter, but it was decidedly cut from the film, thus allowing Alex to survive in this film.

Alternate Ending

The scene on the beach where Clear tells Alex about her family's past was extended. Clear was telling Alex how they must take action and do something big while they still had the time. Clear and Alex ended up making love, and Clear later becomes pregnant (the scene where she finds out was deleted.) When Clear is next on Death's list, Alex saves her from the exploding car, but sacrifices himself to do so and dies. Nine months later, Clear gives birth to a baby boy (which she names Alex) and by doing that, she ruined Death's design because Clear created life that was not meant to be. She and Carter became close friends and they visit the Flight 180 memorial. Clear states that even though they defeated Death this one time, they only won a chance at a full life, because for everyone, there is always that one day. A falling leaf drops and the credits roll.

This ending did not go well in test screenings as Clear becoming pregnant made the film's ending predictable. Also, the general audience disliked how a jerk like Carter gets to live and Alex ended up dying. When the second ending was test screened, many people clapped and cheered when Carter was smooshed by the sign. Although this ending became the official one, the filmmakers actually liked the original ending better. The concept of new life defeating death was incorporated into the storyline of Final Destination 2.

Note: In the original script for this, the ending had a much darker setting. Clear was able to defeat Death only because she had an innocent soul inside her. After giving birth to a baby girl (and now not having an innocent life inside), the hospital shakes, with suspense building up, and the camera zooms in on Clear's face, implying that Death had taken her.

Trivia

The film was originally going to be an X-Files episode.
This film was originally entitled "Flight 180", but was changed at the last second due to a dispute with New Line Cinema.
Many of the characters have names that derive from actors and directors of classic horror films, including Alfred Hitchcock, Max Schreck and others. Clear was named after an assistant. Additionally, Clear's name was originally "Kimberly" in the early draft.
The brother characters Tod and George Waggner (George stayed on the plane) were originally going to be sisters. Brandy Norwood was to play the surviving sister (Tod's role), but the filmmakers went with brothers. Norwood instead appeared in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.
Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst were the first choices for the role of Alex and Clear. They are Spider-Man and Mary Jane Watson in the 2002 movie Spider-Man.
Although it is not confirmed, it is thought that the number 180 in "Flight 180" is a reference to a 180° turn, as in someone or something is behind you (backed up by the Vogues song "Turn Around Look at Me" used throughout Final Destination 3, which starts with the lyric "There is someone walking behind you, turn around, look at me.") It is also believed, though less commonly, that 180 alludes to an arc in the circle of life, representing death.
In the bus scene, right when Carter and Terry arrive in Carter's car, the track "Into the Void" by Nine Inch Nails is playing on the radio and the words "final destination" can be heard in the lyrics.
The bus that runs over Terry is a BC Transit bus.
Blake Dreyer (Christine Chatelain), one of the plane passengers Tod likes at the beginning, is cousin to Carrie Dreyer (Gina Holden) of Final Destination 3, who dies at the start of the film.
The song Rocky Mountain High by John Denver is constantly played in this movie, always before someone dies. This concept was used again for Final Destination 3 when the song "Turn Around, Look At Me" was played before many of the deaths.
Vancouver International Airport stood-in for John F. Kennedy International Airport.
The crash of Flight 180 has a great many similarities with another plane crash, TransWorld Airlines Flight 800. Both planes were 747's, both were bound for Charles de Gaulle after leaving JFK, and both exploded right after take-off due to electrical equipment short circuiting. Among the passengers of Flight 800, there was a group of students from Montoursville, Pennsylvania going on a class trip to France, just like Alex and his classmates in the film.
It is probably no coincidence that the name 'Tod' is the same as the German word 'Tod', meaning 'death'.
In the original script, a pop singing duo was to appear on the plane with one staying on the plane when it exploded. The surviving pop star was most of the comic relief. The characters were later written out and most of the surviving pop star's lines were given to Billy and the singer who stayed on the plane's only line was given to Terry, "You are so not funny".
Death only appears as a shadow in this film, the second and third Final Destination. Death never really has a visible form in the series.
In the opening credits, when the camera pans to Alex's plane ticket, it shows the day Flight 180 crashed. The date was May 13, 2000 at 9:25PM.
The movie takes place on Long Island. Locations such as Jones Beach and John F. Kennedy Airport are shown. Nassau County is mentioned.