Final Destination 3

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Final Destination 3 is a 2006 American supernatural horror film directed by James Wong; it is the third installment in the Final Destination film series. The screenplay was written by Wong and Glen Morgan, both of whom had worked on the franchise's first film. Final Destination 3 stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Ryan Merriman, and is set five years after the first film. Winstead plays Wendy Christensen, a teenager who has a premonition that a roller-coaster on which she and her classmates are riding will derail. Although she saves some of them, Death begins hunting the survivors. Wendy realizes the photographs she took at the amusement park contain clues about her classmates' deaths and tries to use this knowledge to save the rest of them.

Development of the film began shortly after the release of Final Destination 2 (2003); Jeffrey Reddick, creator of the franchise and a co-writer of the first two films, did not return for the third one. In contrast to the second film, which was a direct sequel to the first, Final Destination 3 was envisioned as a stand-alone film. The idea of featuring a roller-coaster derailment as the opening-scene disaster came from New Line Cinema executive Richard Bryant. From the beginning, Wong and Morgan used control as a major theme in the film. Casting began in March 2005--Winstead and Merriman landed the lead roles--and concluded in April. It was filmed in Vancouver, Canada--as were the previous two installments--over a three-month period. The first two weeks were spent filming the roller-coaster's derailment.

Following its premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theatre on February 2, 2006, the film was released in cinemas in the United States on February 10, 2006, and on DVD on July 25. The DVD release includes commentaries, documentaries, a deleted scene and an animated video. A special-edition DVD called "Thrill Ride Edition" includes a feature called "Choose Their Fate", which acts as an interactive film, allowing viewers to make decisions at specific points in the film that alter the course of the story.

Final Destination 3 received a mixed response; some critics called the film formulaic and said it brought nothing new to the franchise while others praised it for being enjoyable and fulfilling its audience's expectations. Positive attention was given to the death scenes involving tanning beds and a nail gun, as well as Winstead's performance. The film was a financial success and, at the time of its release, the highest-grossing installment in the franchise. It was followed by sequels The Final Destination (2009) and Final Destination 5 (2011).

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Plot

High-school student Wendy Christensen visits an amusement park with her boyfriend Jason Wise, best friend Carrie Dreyer, and Carrie's boyfriend Kevin Fischer for their senior-class field trip. As they board the Devil's Flight roller-coaster, Wendy has a premonition that the hydraulics securing the seat belts and coaster cars will fail during the ride, killing everyone on board. When she panics, a fight breaks out and several people--including Kevin--leave or are forced off the ride. They consist of best friends Ashley Freund and Ashlyn Halperin; alumnus Frankie Cheeks; athlete Lewis Romero; and goth couple Ian McKinley and Erin Ulmer. The roller-coaster derails, killing the remaining passengers and leaving Wendy devastated.

Several weeks later, Kevin tells Wendy about an aircraft explosion and the subsequent deaths of the survivors, believing they may be in a similar situation. Thinking Kevin is mocking her, Wendy dismisses his theory. Ashley and Ashlyn die at a tanning salon when a chain reaction traps them in over-heating tanning beds. Now convinced Death is stalking them, Wendy and Kevin set out to save the remaining survivors using omens hidden in photographs taken by Wendy on the night of the roller-coaster derailment.

Frankie dies in a truck accident at a drive-through. The next day, they try to save Lewis at the gym; he says he does not believe them shortly before he is killed by two falling weights. Next, they find Ian and Erin working at a hardware store; Wendy saves Ian from being impaled by falling planks of wood. Erin falls onto a nail gun and is shot repeatedly through the head. After being questioned by the police, Wendy and Kevin are released. Assuming whoever was next must already be dead, they decide to ensure their own safety. As she leaves the station, Wendy is stalked by a grief-stricken Ian.

Wendy learns that her sister Julie and a friend also left the roller-coaster; she rushes to the tricentennial to save them. She and Kevin prevent Julie from being impaled on a harrow and Wendy asks Julie who was sitting next to her on the roller-coaster, because they are next on Death's list. Julie's friend Perry Malinowski is impaled on a flagpole. Wendy saves Kevin from an exploding propane canister caused by ensuing chaos and is confronted by a deranged Ian, who blames her for Erin's death. Wendy dodges exploding fireworks, which strike a nearby cherry picker instead. This collapses on Ian, killing him.

Five months later, Wendy experiences more omens while riding on a subway train with her roommate Laura and friend Sean. As Wendy is about to disembark, she sees Julie entering the car and decides to stay. She later notices Kevin sitting at the back of the car. As the two of them are talking, the train derails and everyone on board except Wendy is killed, including Julie and Kevin. Soon after, Wendy is hit by another train. This turns out to be another premonition and the three try to stop the train. The film ends with a black screen and the sound of screeching metal.

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Cast

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Themes

Three methods of critical response to the Final Destination franchise have predominated in scholarly work. First, it has been framed as a postmodern horror franchise that, in the style of the Scream franchise, self-consciously refers to the history of horror cinema and rewards viewers for their knowledge. Second, the films--particularly The Final Destination (2009) and Final Destination 5 (2011)--have been examined for their visual effects. Third, the franchise has been criticized for being cynical and reductive. For example, the film studies scholar Reynold Humphries dismisses the franchise as "obscurantist nonsense whose only 'idea' is that death is an agency that has a 'plan' for each of us".

According to media studies scholar Eugenie Brinkema, Final Destination films are characterized by their move away from the typical horror antagonist and toward the certainty and inevitability of death. This makes them inconsistent with most other horror films, which require a monster. Final Destination films further depart from other horror films, even those aimed at teenagers, in that they feature "no families, no repression; no psychic, geographic, or domestic hauntings; and no sexuality--neither the pursuit of pleasure in the slasher convention of easy bodily access nor the monstrosity of sexual difference". The films, Brinkema argues, are not about the seeking of pleasure--as are paradigmatic slashers--but are instead about the avoidance of pain and death; they are "constitutively bitter, anhedonic, paranoid, and sad". In these films, death becomes its own cause. The premonition of the roller-coaster derailment in Final Destination 3 is without context or cause but the avoidance of death by some characters grounds the necessity of their deaths, specifically in the order in which they would have died on the roller-coaster. Thus, "Death's list" or "Death's design" is realized. Final Destination 3 spends as much time interpreting deaths as displaying them. Wendy's close analysis of photographs allows her to understand the deaths, but this is inevitably too late. In the franchise's films, Brinkema says, "one must closely read to survive (for a spell), and yet reading changes absolutely nothing at all". Thus, the characters "might as well" have stayed on the roller-coaster.

Ian Conrich, another scholar of film studies, argues the series marks a key departure from slasher norms in that death itself becomes the villain. Final Destination films draw influence from slasher cinema but the franchise's action sequences, including Final Destination 3's roller-coaster derailment, draw from action and disaster cinema. The franchise, for Conrich, thus marks a new slasher-film sub-genre: "In relation to the scale and excess of these [death] sequences, the multiplicity of deaths that can occur in one moment, and the inevitability of death in the context of a wider scheme, I would term these films 'grand slashers'." Other grand slashers include the films in the Saw and Cube franchises.

A notable feature of the Final Destination films is the threshold or tipping-point logic of characters' deaths. Conrich frames the complex death sequences in Final Destination films as "death games, contraptions or puzzles in which there are only losers", which he compares to Rube Goldberg machines, the Grand Guignol, and the Mouse Trap board game. Brinkema picks out the deaths of Ashley and Ashlyn from Final Destination 3 as epitomizing the death sequences in the series. The characters' deaths are brought about by "a series of neutral gestures, a set of constraints that will ultimately lead to their conflagratory ends"; these include the placing of a drink, a rifling-through of CDs, and an ill-chosen doorstop. The scene uses logics of temperature, color, and light to realize the deaths of the characters, and to allow Wendy to recognize the threat they face. The "literal tipping point" at which the characters can no longer escape occurs when a coat rack is knocked onto the sunbeds; it is blown by an air-conditioning unit that is activated by the increasing heat. Conrich identifies the roller-coaster derailment as paradigmatic of the franchise's focus on mobility in death sequences. He argues that theme-park rides and horror cinema are mutually influential; the former draw from the frightening aspects of the latter while the latter draw from the "theatrics and kinetics" of the former.

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Production

Development

Final Destination 3 was originally the last part of a trilogy and had been in development since the release of Final Destination 2. Jeffrey Reddick, creator of the franchise and one of the co-writers of the first two films, did not return for the third installment. Director James Wong said that unlike the franchise's second film, which was closely tied to the first film and continued its story, Final Destination 3 was envisioned as a stand-alone sequel featuring new characters from the beginning. He stated:

[W]e really felt that the idea of Final Destination, or the fact that Death can visit you and you can cheat death, that that could happen to anyone. And so we wanted to divorce from the first film character wise. We didn't want to follow that same thread. Part of the difficulty in that is when a character understands what happened to them before; it's a whole different way in which they react to what's happening now. We felt the franchise could exist with a new group of people, instead of following those older characters all the way through. We wanted to see if this could work.

The film's original title, Cheating Death: Final Destination 3, was changed during development. The companies that co-produced the franchise's first film--Craig Perry and Warren Zide's Zide/Perry Productions, and Wong and Morgan's own Hard Eight Pictures--returned to produce Final Destination 3. Practical Pictures and Manitee Pictures also helped with the film's production. It was initially intended to be filmed in 3D but plans for this were abandoned. Morgan stated this occurred due to financial reasons and because he believed fire and blood effects would not be shown properly through the red filters of anaglyph 3D systems.

The idea of using a roller-coaster derailment as the opening-scene disaster came from New Line Cinema executive Richard Bryant and was not inspired by a Big Thunder Mountain Railroad incident from 2004. The idea of depicting death omens in photographs was taken from The Omen (1976). Morgan said he searched the aisles of a store on Sunset Boulevard for days for inspiration for Erin's hardware-store death. Additionally, loss of control is a major theme that he and Wong had envisioned for the film from the very beginning; this is exemplified by both Wendy, who is afraid of losing control, and the roller-coaster. He stated that one reason people are afraid of roller-coasters is because, as stated by psychologists, "[they] have no control" while riding them.

Casting

During the casting process, Wong sought actors who could portray the main characters as heroic individuals with realistic qualities. Perry echoed this sentiment, stating that for Wendy and Kevin, he and Wong sought actors who "had the charisma of movie stars, but weren't so ridiculously rarified that you couldn't feel like you might know them". The casting of the supporting characters was given equal weight, being considered of equal importance with that of the main characters.

On March 21, 2005, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Ryan Merriman--co-stars of The Ring Two (2005)--were cast as Wendy Christensen and Kevin Fischer. Winstead, who had auditioned for the second Final Destination film, won the role because her portrayal of the character's emotion impressed Wong and Morgan. Wong said he had originally intended Wendy to be a "perky blonde" and reworked the character slightly after Winstead was cast. Wong believed the actors were right for their roles; he said Winstead "[brought] a kind of soulfulness to her role as Wendy" and her character "is deeply affected by the accident, but she's strong, and fights to maintain control". Wong also said "the moment [Merriman] came in I thought he was the right guy to play Kevin" and described the character as "the kind of guy you want to hang out with, your goofy best buddy, but also someone who could rise to the occasion and become a hero".

On April 9, 2005, Kris Lemche and Alexz Johnson were cast as the goth couple Ian McKinley and Erin Ulmer. Johnson, who was starring in the Canadian television series Instant Star (2004-2008), had auditioned to play Wendy's sister Julie; that role later went to Amanda Crew, who originally auditioned to play Erin. Johnson said she wore a rocker jacket during her second reading and was in a bad mood. As she was leaving, the filmmakers called her back to read for Erin, with sarcastic dialogue in her scene. Johnson thought her dry sense of humor, which the filmmakers caught, helped her land the role. Regarding his role, Lemche said Ian "spouts some interesting facts that seem to be just right there on the tips of his fingers". Lemche researched most of Ian's information; during read-throughs he often asked Morgan about Ian's facts, Morgan wrote Lemche notes and gave him URLs to research the information Ian gives out.

Jesse Moss was cast as Wendy's boyfriend Jason Wise. Texas Battle played athlete Lewis Romero. Chelan Simmons took the role of Ashley Freund. Sam Easton portrayed school alumnus Frankie Cheeks. Gina Holden played Kevin's girlfriend and Wendy's best friend, Carrie Dreyer. Crystal Lowe joined the cast as student Ashlyn Halperin. Tony Todd, who appeared in the first two films, did not return as the mortician Bludworth but voiced the devil statue at the roller-coaster and a subway conductor. Maggie Ma and Ecstasia Sanders played Julie's friends Perry Malinowski and Amber Regan, respectively.

Filming and effects

Like the first two installments of the franchise, Final Destination 3 was filmed in Vancouver, Canada. The Corkscrew roller-coaster at Playland was the basis of the Devil's Flight coaster depicted in the film. Winstead and Merriman said the filming took three months. The first two weeks were spent filming the roller-coaster's derailment; the rest of the filming was done out of sequence. Filming concluded in July but the negative reception of the ending in early screenings led to the filming of a new ending sequence featuring a subway train derailment in November 2005.

The death scenes required varying degrees of 2D and 3D graphic enhancement. The roller-coaster scene necessitated 144 visual-effect shots. Custom-designed coaster cars were built and modified for the script; most of the model was hand-built and computer-designed MEL scripts added specific elements. For the coaster-crash scenes, the actors were filmed performing in front of a green screen, to which a CGI background was added. Several of the roller-coaster's cars were suspended with bungee cords to film the crash; the deaths required the use of CGI onscreen effects and each actor had a corresponding CGI double.

Meteor Studios produced the roller-coaster and subway crashes while Digital Dimension handled the post-premonition death scenes. The death of Ian McKinley, who is bisected by a cherry picker, proved especially challenging. A clean plate of the cherry picker falling was originally shot with a plate of Lemche acting crushed and falling to the ground with his bottom half in a partial green-screen suit. After combining those plates, Wong said "he wanted more of a gruesome punch for the shot". A standard CGI body of Lemche's height was used; several animation simulations of the body being crushed with a CGI object were filmed. The director chose the version he liked the most. A new plate was then filmed with Lemche imitating the chosen animation and positioning his body at the end. The scene in which Ashley and Ashlyn are killed on tanning beds was handled by Soho VFX rather than Digital Dimension. It consisted of about 35 shots of CG skin, glass, fire, and smoke mixed with real fire and smoke. The subway crash in the film's epilogue used a CG environment reproducing the main volumes of the set.

Music

The score for Final Destination 3 was composed by Shirley Walker, as were the soundtracks of the previous installments of the series. Score mixer Bobby Fernandez created a "gore-o-meter", measuring the violence of each death to ensure the score would match the scenes. Final Destination 3 is the only film in the series without a released musical score. Greek-American musician Tommy Lee provided a cover of The O'Jays 1972 song "Love Train", which was used in the film's closing credits. Lee enjoyed "put[ting his] own darker spin on it for the movie".

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Release

Several months before the film's release, New Line Cinema set up a promotional website linking to another from where visitors could download mobile-phone ringtones and wallpapers related to the film. As further means of promotion, a novelization written by Christa Faust was published by Black Flame a month before the film's release. Final Destination 3 premiered at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood on February 1, 2006. During San Diego Comic-Con 2006, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, James Wong and Ryan Merriman attended a panel on July 22 to promote the DVD release of the film. They discussed the features of "Choose Their Fate" and the filming of new sequences.

Box office

Final Destination 3 opened on February 10, 2006, in 2,880 theaters in the United States and Canada, and earned $19,173,094 on its opening weekend with an average of $6,657 per theater. The film placed second at the United States box office during its opening weekend, behind the remake of The Pink Panther, which opened the same day and earned $20,220,412 domestically. Final Destination 3 dropped to fifth on its second weekend and seventh on its third, exiting the top-ten list on its fourth weekend. Its last screening, in 135 theaters, occurred during its tenth weekend; the film finished at 37th place with $105,940. Final Destination 3's total earnings were $54,098,051 at the domestic box office and $63,621,107 internationally, with a worldwide gross of $117,719,158. At the time of its release, the film was the most financially successful installment in the franchise; it retained this title until it was surpassed in 2009 by The Final Destination, which achieved a worldwide gross of $186,167,139.

Home media

The film was released on DVD on July 25, 2006, in widescreen and fullscreen formats. Special features include an audio commentary, a deleted scene, three documentaries, the theatrical trailer, and an original animated video. Audio commentary is by Wong, Morgan and cinematographer Robert Mclachlan. The deleted scene is an extended version of Wendy and Kevin's discussion after they are questioned by the police. The first documentary, Dead Teenager Movie, examines the history of slasher films. The second, Kill Shot: Making Final Destination 3, focuses on the making of the film and includes interviews with the cast and crew. The third documentary, Severed Piece, discusses the film's special effects, pyrotechnics, and gore effects. A seven-minute animated film, It's All Around You, explains the various ways people can die. Special DVD editions labeled "Thrill Ride Edition" also include an optional feature called "Choose Their Fate", allowing viewers to make decisions at several points in the film. Most provide only minor alterations to the death scenes but the first choice allows the viewer to stop Wendy, Kevin, Jason, and Carrie from boarding the roller-coaster before the premonition, ending the film immediately. Final Destination 3 was released digitally on streaming platforms Amazon Video, Google Play, and Netflix.

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Reception

Critical response

Final Destination 3 received mixed critical responses when it was released. Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports that 43% of 116 critics gave the film a positive review; the average rating is five out of ten. According to the site's consensus, "[the film] is more of the same: gory and pointless, with nowhere new to go". The film averaged 41 out of 100, based on 28 critics, on Metacritic, indicating "mixed or average reviews". CinemaScore reported that audiences gave the film a "B+" on a scale running from A+ to F.

Several critics described the story as formulaic when compared to the previous installments; Roger Ebert wrote that the film's main issue was its predictability and lack of tension because it was "clear to everyone who must die and in what order". Variety compared the narrative negatively with the franchise's second installment, describing the third film as lacking intricacy. The New York Times similarly described the film as lacking the "novelty of the first [or] the panache of the second". The downtime between characters' deaths was perceived as "dull" by TV Guide, which highlighted it as one reason the film failed to match the formula set out by the previous installments. Other reviewers were more positive; IGN praised the story--Chris Carle wrote that the "formula has been perfected rather than worn out" by the third film. Empire's Kim Newman and The Guardian found the story to be enjoyable but said Final Destination 3 primarily adhered to the structure set out by the rest of the franchise.

The film's tone and death scenes were positively received by critics. Writing for ReelViews, James Berardinelli described Final Destination 3 as incorporating more humor in comparison to its predecessors and said it worked to the film's benefit. The Seattle Times agreed the film's humorous tone helped to elevate it and said fans of the franchise would enjoy the death sequences. Sarah Dobbs of Den of Geek!, a publication of Dennis Publishing, said the tone made Final Destination 3 the high point of the franchise. Dobbs commended the film's style as a "brightly coloured [and] slightly silly meditation on how we're all gonna die one day, so we might as well do it explosively". The tanning bed and nail gun scenes were singled out as the best death sequences from the film and the franchise as a whole.

Winstead's performance was highlighted by critics; according to the BBC, "... the real tragedy is that promising young actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead must endure this torture". She was described as delivering "as competent a job as one could expect in these dire circumstances" by Berardinelli. Felix Gonzalez, Jr. of DVD Reviews praised Winstead's and Merriman's performances as one of the few positive aspects of the film.

Accolades

Final Destination 3 was nominated at the 2006 Fangoria Chainsaw Awards for Highest Body Count, Line That Killed (Best One-Liner), Sickest FX (Best Special Effects) as well as Most Thrilling Killing (Best Death Scene) for Frankie's death. At the 2007 Saturn Awards it was nominated for Best Horror Film and the "Thrill Ride Edition" was nominated for Best DVD Special Edition Release.

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Notes

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References

Footnotes

Bibliography

• Brinkema, Eugenie (2015). "Design Terminable and Interminable: The Possibility of Death in Final Destination". Journal of Visual Culture. 14 (3): 298-310. doi:10.1177/1470412915607923. 
• Conrich, Ian (2015). "Puzzles, Contraptions and the Highly Elaborate Moment: The Inevitability of Death in the Grand Slasher Narratives of the Final Destination and Saw Series of Films". In Clayton, Wickham. Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film. Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 106-17. doi:10.1057/9781137496478_8. ISBN 9781137496478. 
• Humphries, Reynold (2002). The American Horror Film: An Introduction. Edinburgh, United Kingdom: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 9780748614165. 

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External links

• Final Destination 3 on IMDb
• Final Destination 3 at AllMovie

Source of the article : Wikipedia