Final Destination Bloodlines: The Generational Echo of Death
I intend to enjoy the time I have left, and I suggest you do the same. Life is precious. Enjoy every single second. You never know when... Good luck.
When I watched the first Final Destination movie way back in 2000, I was pretty impressed by its plot. It had the perfect antagonist, Death itself. When some people cheat Death, it comes to claim them in the perfect order in which they escaped. They die in elaborate setups that seem like random coincidence but have the precision of dominoes falling. Its philosophy of not playing with death was a lame one but perfectly satisfying for a thrilling low-budget horror/slasher movie.
The second installment that came a few years later had an incredible opening scene that made an entire generation of moviegoers fear log trucks on highways. A few more sequels came later, but the plot was mostly the same, the only difference being the variety in death sequences. I don't think I've watched the last few, but I'm not sure of it, as there is not much to distinguish them from each other. So I wasn't expecting anything other than some cheap thrills when I sat down to watch the latest one.
In the new addition to the franchise titled Final Destination Bloodlines, there is nothing much different from the prequels other than a few details. In this, we realize that if Death is unable to quickly dispose of the escapee, and he/she manages to have offspring, Death will come for them also. So this time the attacks are generational. They had a great chance to develop this theme into a brilliant allegory about generational trauma. But for good or bad, they held back and continued more or less the same tradition of cheap gore and mindless deaths.
Normally in these movies, the central character who is about to embark on an adventure has a premonition, resulting in that person along with some others deciding not to proceed, thereby escaping from death. In this movie the character who goes for a fancy dinner atop a new rooftop restaurant and saves the attendees from the catastrophe, through a premonition, is not the protagonist, but her granddaughter, who starts having recurring nightmares of all of the attendees dying gruesomely. She decides to find her granny, who lives in a self-made fortress, defying death for decades. But when the granddaughter doesn't believe her paranoiac blabbering, she decides to give a live demonstration of death's nefarious plans for her.
She has a horrific demise, bathing the granddaughter in her blood and other internal organs, but manages to convince her. The granddaughter goes back to convince her other family members that as Granny is now dead, it's their time to die as per seniority. Though initially doubtful, a couple of splattering deaths convince all, and they begin searching for ways to survive.
Bloodlines is grander in the sense that it tries to bring all the seemingly unrelated prequels inside a single umbrella. But it never tries to go outside the familiar territory. The movie is technically superior, but the acting is ordinary, the plot is just an excuse to move from one orchestrated death sequence to the next, and there are times when the pacing comes to a standstill.
One character who made an impact in the original movie is the enigmatic mortician played by Tony Todd, who explains to the protagonist and us viewers the rules of the game. In Bloodlines, the makers have given Todd, who passed away after completing his scenes, a heartfelt sendoff with the quotation mentioned in the beginning of this post as his parting words.
Overall, if you love to revisit the franchise after an absence of around fourteen years or if you're a fan of mindless violent slasher movies, Final Destination Bloodlines is perfect.