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** Reading that made me dizzy.
** I've theorized that death is a drama queen and uses the premonitions as an excuse to get full control over the universe, to knock them off in ways he sees fit. I've heard one quote from a final destination character that suggests that death likes having an audience for his rube goldbergs
* Why do these movies exist? Seriously, why do they exist? From a purely metalogical standpoint, the premise just makes no sense whatsoever: Someone has a premonition that a bunch of people including themselves will die horribly in an accident, saves some people and themselves from said accident, then they all (mostly) get killed one by one in a series of [[Necro Non Sequitur|bizarre accidents]] by the [[Grim Reaper]]. Either Grimmy is bored with normal death, and is screwing with the vision-bearer ''just'' to cause the Rube Goldbergian deaths and get a chuckle, or he has no idea that the visions even exist, and ends up getting caught with his scythe up his pelvis when the supposed victims avoid their fate. Either way, what's the point?
** Because the writer was inspired by the ''[[Twilight Zone]]'' episode "Twenty-two" and wanted to expand the story into a full length movie.
** Some dork in the US has obviously gotten his own [[Death Note]] and is getting his chuckles by trying to see what are the most over-complicated ways he can kill someone.
*** Let's run with that theory for a second. Under this assumption, does it mean that some people have discovered ways to evade the power of the Death Note (through premonition), or that this dork is a truly sick mind, giving people visions to give them the false hope of escape?
**** I'm going to go with the latter. Never underestimate the human capacity for being seriously twisted.
**** Or the original "accidents" targeted specific people, allowing for the possibility of others not named in the Note to escape them. You then get into the god-complex suggestion below for the survivors.
**** Alternativly, the 'dork' in question has had the Note for a while and doesn't have a 'cause' or pursuers to keep things interesting, so they're getting a bit bored. Then a bunch of people escape death through visions and thanks to the dork having a truly sick sense of humour the idea of picking them off one by one as creatively as possible was too tempting to pass up.
** Because they're fun? Not quite sure what your problem is, though. Some people have visions of themselves being killed. By avoiding this, they incur the wrath of Death itself, which feels the need to correct the order of things. The deaths are elaborate because Death itself ''hates'' those that have escaped its grasp, as mentioned in Final Destination 3.
*** Yeah, but you gotta admit, the concept is kinda dumb. I remember figuring just how dumb it was after the first death, when the Reaper decided to ''cover up'' the fatal slip by pushing the soap back up into the bottle.
**** Indeed. This troper's big question is why Death doesn't just make them all terminal instead, since it would be much simpler. This led to the conclusion that Grimmy is just a show-off drama queen.
**** Not only is the concept dumb, but why is Death acting so malevolently? It has existed since the beginning of life, and therefore a human lifespan is less than the blink of an eye. Don't get me started about Death "having a plan;" that's just [[You Can't Fight Fate|an inescapable fate ordained by a sadistic higher power]], which bugs me more than a lame slasher flick.
***** I liked the premise, just as long as it was that their cards were marked and inexorable fate was cleaning up the loose ends with bizarre accidents, not through malice but cosmic accountancy. I could even buy the idea that they'd fallen into a world of portents and symbols, but having the train appear in a car window to forewarn them it was coming was where it jumped the marine creature. Then it unraveled with the second, and I haven't bothered with the third.
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** I agree with the original question. What's the point? Even if you manage to defy death once, you have to keep doing it again and again (as the girl from the first movie proved in the second by locking herself up in an asylum.) And the end result? ''You're going to die anyway.'' It's inevitable, isn't it? In the end, even if it's many years later, the characters are going to die! Seems like a waste of time to spend all those years locked up doing nothing.
*** Well, here's the thing: the whole point of the movies is that the characters evade a gristly death due to a last-moment premonition, only to be hunted down by Death because their survival upset Death's books. The premonitions are the key, here: there's only two reasons someone would get a premonition -- 1. They were fated to die that day, but a higher power wants them to live for some reason, or 2. The writers were going for classic Greek irony and showing the futility of fighting fate by usually having the characters' attempts to avoid their doom be the very thing that causes it. As I stated before, if it's the former, it makes no sense, since it's clear that Death itself doesn't seem to realize the premonitions exist, and are just taking out the survivors out of spite for ruining his master plan, but the latter explanation doesn't seem to work, either, since there's [[Isn't It Ironic?|no dramatic irony created]] by having the characters survive due to a premonition only to be taken out by something completely different (and, usually, totally unrelated to how they would've died, in the first place). The correct dramatic irony would be if the characters survived the initial accident, but either died from a follow-up accident caused by the initial one ({{spoiler|like the first victim does by having a tire from the racecar crash decapitate her}}), or by dying by something similar or related in some way to the original accident (like how {{spoiler|the final three survivors of the coaster crash in the third movie died in a subway accident}}). It also flies in the face of how violently Death claims the survivors, and how everyone treats their survival as being ''against'' Death's plan; if Death ''was'' the one giving the characters the premonitions ({{spoiler|as is hinted in the fourth movie}}), then why is he doing it? What's the point? To make them die more spectacularly? Isn't that kind of petty of Death? The entire premise of the series is just so ludicrous and illogical, that there's just no way of consolidating it.
*** It pretty much goes like this; Final Destination 1 was about these kids cheating death and in turn the Grim Reaper trying to kill them again because they cheated him. But, as strange as this may sound, he was trying to kill them in a relatively believable way. Such as {{spoiler|Todd (Committed suicide due to [[Survivors Guilt]]) Terry (Hit by a bus) and Valerie (murdered by Alex)}} Even the more plausible deaths {{spoiler|Billy (decapitated by a loose chain whipped up from the wheel of a train) and Carter (hit by a large swinging billboard)}} are still somewhat believable. The sequels completely threw away the practicality of the first films deaths and tries to push the methods of execution to their logical extreme.
*** You can actually follow the path of things getting increasingly more unbelievable in the second movie. {{spoiler|Evan (Fell from fire escape and ladder was jostled free be the movement.) Tim (Pidgeons actually did disturb the man running the crane.) Nora(Err...well, Clear set up the elevator going up, so not too bad.) Kat (Delayed reaction to the airbag...alright. Pipes in the car...well, it makes sense in context.) Rory(Err...yah.) Eugene/Clear (Physically imposslbe.) and Brian(...hehe...)}}
* In the third movie, during the scene with the girls dying in the tanning beds, the machine states that it can't be set any higher than a certain temperature. Why then, would it be built so it could?
** This is an example of one of the more ludicrous kills in FD. Although many of them would actually work, (the nailgun through the back of the head later on for example), some of them just plain don't. Death would have had to actually break the laws of physics to get those tanning beds to do what they did, which brings the interesting question of why bother shorting out the machinery when you can apparently reprogram the entire thing and put new parts in it as well. There's no physical way to die that fast in a tanning bed, they're specifically designed not to do that, and of all the FD kills, the tanning bed comes in a tie for the most ludicrous with the car engine that leaps out of the bonnet and eats the guy in the car in front. Death likes rewriting physics it seems.
*** I have just been informed that some of the books have even more stupidly ridiculous ways of killing people, such as a liposuction machine. I take back my previous statement about the tanning beds being the most ridiculous way of killing somone.
**** This troper recalls the whole "death by tanning beds" thing disproved on [[
***** Actually, liposuction deaths (or at least extreme organ damage) are possible, if the doctor is clumsy and sticks the vacuum into an organ instead of fat deposits.
**** I always wanted to see Death just drop the pretense and have a gun float into the room and shoot someone.
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*** Not ludicrous at all, it -has- happend in real life. A handful of people have been {{spoiler|disemboweled by pool drainage systems}} before.
**** Thank you for initially forgetting to spoiler that.
***** Even more riddiculous, the guy in the novels who gets killed by being sliced up with CDS and DVDs being fired at high speed from players. As in slicing through his spine, neck, and neatly cutting his hand off. I wish to call bullshit on this.
** Technicalities aside, why would would the girls ''burn''? I'd understood if they died of massive skin/lung burns or pain shock, but they torched like a pile of coal soaked with gasoline! What, is the tanning cream THAT flammable?
* At the end of every movie, the protagonist temporarily kills themselves with some "suicide serum" in order to "cheat death". Okay. Then...why was the guy who tried to commit suicide by gun ''prevented'' from doing so ''by Death himself''? Ignoring the explanation that "Death has a schedule, and the guy wasn't scheduled to die, just then" (I'll get to the illogic of that in a moment), the incident clearly showed that ''Death can influence and interfere with a person's death'', not just cause it. If that's the case, then why can he not prevent these mere humans from tricking him into checking them off his book through a little pseudo-suicide? I could ''maybe'' forgive him for missing it in the first movie, but ''not'' any of the sequels; he should've caught on and ensured the syringe caused massive hemorrhaging or something when they tried it.
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** The protagonist and friends didn't ask him to move after the protagonist had the premonition; if they had, perhaps he would have died and thus he survived as a result of the premonition.
*** That makes no sense, since you're pretty much saying that he survived due to the premonition ''because he was not influenced at all by the premonition''. That does not work; if the protagonist and his friends didn't do anything to the guy to try and get him to avoid his death in the premonition, that means he played out his part in Death's design for the accident as the premonition showed, meaning ''he survived independently of the premonition''. He was caught up in the accident and got crushed by the falling debris, ''just like'' he had been in the premonition, ''and survived''. That's him surviving the accident ''separately'' from the premonition, ''not'' as a result of it. So why must he die?
*** He was supposed to move. However, before the protagonists could ask him to move, Nick had his vision and they hightailed it out of there. He therefore was out of place in Death's design, and he managed to survive by pure luck. Death must have been been distracted while saying "Oh bugger, another one of those prophets." and decapitating a woman with a tire.
**** First of all, why was Jonathan supposed to move, again? And if the vision was what caused Nick to not ask Jonathan to move, in the first place (and the visions {{spoiler|were supposed to be part of Death's Plan, as hinted at the end of the movie)}}), then that means that ''Death himself'' saved the poor guy from dying.
**** Alright, let's just look at it this way. After the vision begins, Jonathan notices his hat blocks our protagonists and moves down closer. Therefore, when the shit hits the fan, he is slightly higher up and farther away than he was in the original vision. So the flaming car that hit him didn't hit hit, because he was already farther up, and being crushed under rubble, but still alive. Death, having already plotted out his latest design, and having his OCD thing with order, doesn't bother to toss in another rock or two while he's nudging a tire to fall on Nadia. He is rescued and sent to the hospital, where he is recovering until the room above collapses upon him.
* Just what is causing all these premonitions in the first place? You'd think after four movies they'd explain something about it, even if it does turn out to be some ridiculous magical psychic voodoo thing.
** According to the ending of the fourth movie, {{spoiler|Death itself is giving the visions to the protagonists, so he could maneuver them into where and when he wants them to be when he finally comes for them. As I stated above, this makes no sense, since it doesn't work on any sort of ironic level, as we're lead to believe for almost the entirety of the first four movies that the visions were supposed to ''screw up'' Death's plan, and seems like a waste of time and effort on Death's part, as he could've just had them die in a more convenient and efficient way.}} In the comics, however, {{spoiler|it's revealed that the visions are from a reincarnated goddess of Death, who is trying to disrupt Death's plan, since Death used her resurrection to enter into our world when it wasn't supposed to, thus unbalancing the furies or some crap like that.}} Personally, while both theories are dumb, I'd much prefer the latter more than the former, as it makes a little bit more sense, and doesn't open up plot holes the size of the Big Bang.
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** This gets lampshaded in the book ''Final Destination: Destination Zero''. Disaster survivor Will Sax at one point states that yeah, he gets that Death wants them dead. What he doesn't get is why it takes such perverse delight in offing them in the most horrible and gory ways possible.
** In the fourth movie, {{spoiler|the mall collapse kills an amazing amount of people and not just the intended survivors.}}, so by {{spoiler|preventing it}}, doesn't the protagonist put another large group of people in danger of being killed in more spectacular ways?
** Perhaps by this time, Death has gotten bored with his "normal" job, and is just having fun, possibly not even realizing how horrible he's being; he sent the second "theater" vision in the fourth movie to just to mess with the protagonist even more, but Death had to make it "look real," so that's why the second disaster was barely averted. Notably, a bystander does say the protagonist "saved a lot of people," which gets him thinking it might not be over.
*** No, the point with the mall scene was that it was a rehash of the initial accident in the racetrack: All the important details and clues were the same, ''including the protagonist saving people thanks to a vision''. The vision and the saving-of-people was just part of the rehash.
** There's also the fact that if the survivors witnessed the horrible accident they had avoided, then all of them spontaneously keeled over from heart attacks, strokes and other such things... it wouldn't really make a very interesting movie.
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** Obviously because more tropers have watched the movies than read the books, and it is they who add examples.
* I remember something from the fourth trailer about a few nails springing off and big cracks coming up in a racing stadium all leading to a car crash. To me, that's just too audacious, and I just knew that I wasn't one for this series.
** No, a screwdriver being stuck in a racecar and falling onto the track caused the car crash. The stadium was old, and the cracks and nails popping loose were to show how unstable it was. Once the big explosions started popping up all over the place, the stands couldn't handle the stress.
* The concept itself is ridiculous to this troper. Does it matter how you escaped death? If it happened, then you weren't going to die in the first place, negating the whole point of the movie. Cause is cause, doesn't matter if you decided to turn left at one point or did something because of a dream.
** It matters a lot, actually. Say you're supposed to die in a building fire, but after your premonition, you avoid the building completely. Or even better, say someone else is supposed to die in that fire, but avoids it because of a vision and then saves you from getting hit by a bus when you're not paying attention, one day. In both cases, you've either mucked up the design and pissed off Death, or Death is pulling your strings like a sadistic puppet master. Regardless, the premonitions are always the key; without them, events would play out sans interruption, and the effects of said interruptions are what these movies are about.
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** You sound like the kind of person I like to see die in these kinds of movies. No offense.
* Was the impending mall disaster at the climax of ''The Final Destination'' still fallout from the racetrack disaster at the beginning of the movie, or was it a new disaster that was just averted by one of the racetrack survivors? [[Fridge Horror|(And if it's the latter, how long will the hundreds of people whose lives were saved really expect to live afterwards?)]]
** Maybe since the disaster itself never actually happened, as opposed to the raceway crash, the effects are negated. Nick prevents the explosion itself, when before he simply got his friends and a few others out of the raceway. Instead of removing a few pieces of the puzzle, Nick pretty much tossed the entire thing off the table.
* How exactly did the rollar coaster manage to derail in the third movie? The premonition showed how the one guy's camera ended up on the tracks which caused everything to start derailing, but he was one of the people who got off the ride. Therefore, he wouldn't have dropped the camera and then no one would have died. Initially.
** The hydraulics were already messed up. (When the attendant was snapping harnesses down, the pipes underneath the cars began to leak). While the camera wasn't present, Death may have instead found some convenient doohickey owned by another kid on the roller coaster and made it fall while they were on the loop. Or perhaps the emptiness of the back cars upset the balance of the already unstable coster and caused it. There's a slew of reasons.
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** A busy one?
*** Well then an assistant should be in there. You don't leave a patient alone.
*** He hadn't actually started the procedure, though. The power surge caused the machine to turn itself up, and Olivia's own panic was what turned on the laser. The doctor thought he was just leaving a woman with a numb eye alone, not a woman under the laser of death.
** But she was strapped in and had her eye held open. Don't you need someone to moisten it? More to the point though, why didn't she cover her eye earlier? I know we could write PAGES on the idiocy of the characters, but my God, protecting your eyes is practically instinct. She could have covered her eye with one hand and unscrewed the vice of the head with the other at least.
*** By the time that she needed to cover her eye, the beam was powerful enough to scorch her hand even when it was protecting her. As far as she knew, nothing had gone wrong yet, she was just sorta creeped out.
**** She could've even used the teddybear as a makeshift eye shield, but she didn't. [[What an Idiot!]], indeed.
***** Yes, even if it could easily burn her hand, I'm sure that stuffed animal would have held out, even if the first blast hadn't made her drop it.
* The laser eye surgery room has the weakest glass window EVER. All she did was trip and fell lightly against the glass and it breaks as if she was running like a bull trying to smash it.
** Clearly Death tampered with it during manufacturing so it would break easy.
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* In the end how could {{spoiler|Sam}} not hear {{spoiler|Alex scream at the top of his lungs that they need to get off the plane and that it's going to explode}}? And if he did hear even some bit of it, you'd think he'd immediately be alerted, right?
** Alex took a while to break down in the first movie. He might have been in the bathroom or something and not overheard it.
* Death wants to kill the people in the same order they are supposed to die. So, when the teens cheated Death, did that put everyone in the rest of the world who was supposed to die on hold while he went after a handful of people, since they were supposed to die after them? Just based on some quick math, that's about 3.6 million people who should have died over the course of story.
** Death wants to kill them in the order they died ''in the accidents''. In the whole 'order' thing, only the accidents matter, because they didn't die at the right time.
* I understand that this movie takes place in a pre-9/11 world, but would the FBI agents really have let them all go that easily after the plane blew up?
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Final Destination]]▼
[[Category:Headscratchers]]
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