Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		4.5
Overall		3.5

Final Destination 3 Blu-ray Movie Review

Back to Basics

Reviewed by Michael Reuben September 7, 2011

In a detour into good taste, the New Line brass brought back Glen Morgan and James Wong, co-creators of the Final Destination series, for its third installment. (Maybe the best picture Oscar for the third Lord of the Rings went to their heads, in a good way.) Not that they gave Morgan and Wong complete freedom. Someone had already made the decision to set the film's central disaster on a roller coaster, and everyone wanted to retain the explicit gore that had proven so popular with the hardcore horror crowd. But within these parameters, Morgan and Wong were free to reintroduce quality into the franchise.

The difference is obvious from the opening frame. Just as Morgan and Wong redid the signature opening credits for the season of Millennium they oversaw (the best of the series), they altered the introductory New Line logo on FD3, eliminating its upbeat theme and modifying its colors to blend into a spooky montage of deserted amusement park rides and foreboding carnival attractions. No weighing down the opening with dull exposition about Flight 180 or the highway disaster exactly one year later -- these filmmakers understand that, if you've bought a ticket to a film with the number "3" in the title, you probably don't need (or want) the backstory. So they concentrated on atmosphere, just as they did in the opening of the original Final Destination.

But even the best suffer from creative exhaustion, and by the end of FD3 it had clearly set in. I'll come back to that later.

In McKinley, Pennsylvania, members of the senior high school class visit the local amusement park. Among them is the yearbook photographer, Wendy Christensen (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, the rainbow-haired beauty whose exes Scott Pilgrim will have to fight). Accompanied by her boyfriend, Jason (Jesse Wise) and her best friend, Carrie (Gina Holden) and her boyfriend, Kevin (Ryan Merriman), Wendy snaps yearbook pictures of everyone from their class. The subjects include a football player, Lewis (Texas Battle); two airheads, Ashley and Ashlyn (Chelan Simmons and Crystal Lowe); a smarmy alum known as "Frankie Cheeks" (Sam Easton); two rebels with a mildly goth look, Ian and Erin (Kris Lemche and Alexz Johnson); and, though she's not a senior, Wendy's sister, Julie (Amanda Crew).

Wendy's friends want to ride the massive roller coaster known as Devil's Flight (voiced, in a sly cameo, by series regular Tony Todd). Wendy is afraid but gets pressured to accompany them. Just before the ride departs, she experiences a vivid premonition of multiple mechanical malfunctions that kill every passenger, including herself. Wendy becomes hysterical, insisting that the staff stop the ride, but they hustle her away, along with several other passengers. Just as they reach ground level, the Devil's Flight ride crashes to the ground.

This being a Final Destination film, we all know what happens next: The survivors start dying off in freakish, mysterious and, most importantly, grotesque ways. With FD2 having raised (more accurately, lowered) the standards for gross-out humor, FD3 has certain audience expectations to fulfill. (In the "Planned Accidents" featurette, producer Craig Perry can be heard urging director Wong to show a heart ventricle from a victim landing on the face of an onlooker. The director is unreceptive.)

But Morgan and Wong are fine enough craftsmen (even when working with genre schlock), and have enough confidence in their cinematic technique, to make their characters die from elements they've already shown the audience in great detail, instead of engaging in elaborate games of misdirection, like the hacks who made FD2. If two people are going to die on tanning beds, they show you the tanning beds, along with all their controls and operations and how they're positioned in the room. There's a deliberate and suspenseful build-up to disaster, giving the audience plenty of information that the characters don't have, just as Hitchcock recommended. (If the makers of FD2 had written the same scene, the victims would have emerged from the tanning beds unscathed, only to be incinerated by some accidental discharge from an unshielded microwave oven as they left the salon.)

Morgan and Wong also avoid another mistake made in FD2. Having invented the Death's plan mythology of Final Destination, they know enough not to get bogged down with it. Anyone who worked on The X-Files and Millennium understands that such mythologies function best when they're left vague and mysterious. Start trying to nail them down, and you'd better be prepared to do so as thoroughly as Richard Kelly in Donnie Darko. Do something in between, and it becomes half-hearted and inconsistent, which is exactly what happened in FD2. Here, Kevin, whom Wendy doesn't particularly like, is the one who looks up the history of Flight 180 and the highway crash a year later. But Wendy develops her own theory after she examines the pictures she took and sees foreshadowings of death in the imagery; then she starts to see the same thing in last photographs of famous historical figures who met with violent deaths. The photography motif allows FD3 to bring the Death mythology forward into the current film, without burdening it with a load of exposition carried over from previous movies. It's an inspired device, even if it was borrowed from The Omen (a point that isn't mentioned in the disc's extensive extras).

But as I said at the outset, even the best creative minds hit a wall at some point. Morgan and Wong couldn't think of an ending, and when the film was first shown to an audience, it simply ended after the extended sequence of events at a Fourth of July celebration. No one was satisfied, including the test audience. After much internal debate, a new sequence was written and shot, beginning with the words "Five Months Later". It's a technically proficient piece of work, but it feels just as tacked-on as its production history suggests, because it doesn't make a lot of sense. However, it does give a bloodthirsty audience exactly what they want. When you listen to Morgan's comments about it in the "Kill Shot" documentary, you can tell he's a little ashamed. And he should be.

Final Destination 3 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Cinematographer Robert McLachlan returned with Morgan and Wong, but this time he's shooting for a 2.35:1 frame that is well-suited to the long expanse of the roller coaster that gets the film started. McLachlan also moved away from the mysterious pools of darkness that he favored for the first film, and he adopted a bright, colorful look that appears to have been derived from the amusement park where the Devil's Flight ride is located. The 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray reproduces McLachlan's images with excellent detail, deep blacks, superb color delineation, no indication of DNR or other detail stripping, and no compression or other digital artifacts. There is little or no visible grain, but that isn't unusual in a Blu-ray sourced from a digital intermediate. (FD3 appears to be the first in the series to receive the full DI treatment.)

Final Destination 3 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The soundtrack for FD3, presented in Dolby TrueHD 5.1, makes aggressive use of the surrounds, especially in the opening amusement park sequence. Even before we see anyone boarding Devil's Flight, we're very much aware of its presence, because we can hear the ride racing back and forth behind or to the side. Later set pieces involving electrical circuits, car crashes, the contents of a Home Depot-like store, a galloping horse, fireworks and a subway give the audio system a similarly aggressive workout. Bass extension is powerful, though not overwhelming, and dialogue remains clear and centered. Shirley Walker continues her duties as composer, and by now she understands what a FD scene needs musically better than anyone else. Her score is well presented by the TrueHD track.

Final Destination 3 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The "Choose Their Fate" alternate version advertised on the packaging and featured on the DVD release has not been included. All other advertised features are available.

• Commentary with Writer/Director/Producer James Wong, Writer/Producer Glen Morgan and Cinematographer Robert McLachlan: This commentary is considerably less energetic than the one that Morgan and Wong supplied for Final Destination, and it has more than few pauses. Given McLachlan's presence, there is an understandable tendency to focus on technical issues, although thematic points routinely emerge, e.g., in the discussion of the opening montage.



• It's All Around You (SD; 1.78:1, enhanced; 6:46): An amusing cartoon about death and the odds of dying from various causes.



• Dead Teenager Movie (SD; 1.78:1, enhanced; 24:39): This is an entertaining overview of a sub-genre, for which the name was coined by Roger Ebert (an interviewee) and on which much of New Line's early success was built. Various commentators discuss the appeal of films whose plots consist primarily of teenagers being slaughtered in increasingly outlandish ways.



• Kill Shot: The Making of FD3 (SD; 1.78:1, enhanced; 1:29:00): This is one of the best and most detailed "making of" documentaries I have ever seen. It takes the viewer through the entire shoot with substantial footage from the set and interviews with the filmmakers. Assembled with obvious care and a sense of humor reflected in its chapter titles (e.g., "Abusement Park"; "Bring Me the Head of Franklin Cheeks"), it's more entertaining and informative than the commentary (and, indeed, most commentaries).



• Severed Pieces (SD; 1.78:1, enhanced; 13:27): These six shorts cover various technical elements. "The Noises" deals with foley and sound effects. "The Crash" covers a tricky stunt sequence that went awry on the first try and had to be redesigned. "The Wedgemaster" is the nickname of a grip who had the essential job of signaling actors for a startled reaction; this short documents his technique. The title of "The Explosion" should be self-explanatory. "The Miniatures" are special effects creations built to scale, in this case, subway cars. "The Tear" addresses the challenge that Winstead faced in making a tear roll out of her eye whenever Wendy has a premonition. The challenge wasn't emotional, but technical, because Winstead had to make a tear fall out while keeping her eye wide open, with a camera pushed right up against her face and an entire crew standing around waiting for her.



• Extended Police Station Scene (One-Shot Version) (SD; 2.35:1, enhanced; 2:29): This is an alternate version of the scene as it appears in the finished film.



• Planned Accidents (SD; 1.78:1, enhanced; 20:00:00): In its approach, this featurette is the closest thing on the disc to an EPK, because it was completed before the film's release and is obviously aimed at drawing fans to the theater. But it has more substance than the usual EPK, focusing closely on the roller coast sequence and the effects technology that made it possible. Some of its coverage goes beyond even what's included in the "Kill Shot" documentary.



• TV Spots (SD; 2.35:1, enhanced): There are three spots, each 34 seconds long.



• Theatrical Trailer (SD; 1:85:1, enhanced; 1:24): "This Time Death Will Finish Them". You mean, as opposed to the previous two times?

Final Destination 3 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Given how Morgan and Wong struggled with the ending of FD3, it's hardly surprising that New Line returned to the team behind FD2 when they wanted a new installment (which was called The Final Destination, no doubt because a "4" would have been just too embarrassing). That team could never suffer from creative exhaustion, because you have to be creative in the first place. For managing to recapture some of the series' original spirit, the film of FD3 is recommended and, for technical quality and fine extras, the Blu-ray is highly recommended.