Final Destination
Short description
Final Destination centres on Alex Browning, a high school student about to fly to Paris with his class. On board, he has a sudden vision of the plane exploding after takeoff and panics, and he and several others are removed before departure. The aircraft then blows up, leaving the group as survivors and Alex as a suspect. It soon becomes clear that escaping the crash was only a postponement: the survivors begin dying in strange accidents, and Alex tries to work out the pattern behind the deaths before it reaches him and his friends.
The film was released in 2000 and was the first feature directed by James Wong, who also co-wrote it with Jeffrey Reddick and Glen Morgan. Devon Sawa plays Alex, with Ali Larter as Clear Rivers, Kerr Smith as Carter Horton and Kristen Cloke as their teacher, while Daniel Roebuck and Roger Guenveur Smith appear as the investigators. Craig Perry, Warren Zide and Glen Morgan produced. Wong went on to direct The One, Final Destination 3 and Dragonball Evolution.
Made for about 23 million dollars, the film took roughly 113 million worldwide, a strong return that established a durable horror series. On IMDb it holds 6.7 from around 333,000 votes, and on TMDB 6.6 from about 6,950, so viewers generally rate it somewhat above the critics' rating of 5.6 from 164 reviews.
What's left behind the scenes
- Much of the news report about the plane explosion is taken from a real incident that occurred in July 1996. On July 17, 1996, a Boeing 747 aircraft of Trans World Airlines, en route from New York to Paris (Flight 800), exploded and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean just minutes after takeoff. None of the passengers or crew (230 people) survived. The investigation lasted more than four years and led American experts to conclude that the cause of the plane crash was an electrical wiring failure, not a terrorist attack or a design defect in the aircraft, as had been repeatedly claimed in the American press.
- A working title for the film was "Flight 180".
- The film uses music by John Denver, a composer who died in a plane crash.
- Originally, the plot was intended to be used for one of the episodes of the TV series “The X-Files” (1993-2018), and the idea for the plot was inspired by the screenplay for the horror film “Alone” (1984) by Tom Eberhardt. In that film, a girl becomes the sole survivor of a plane crash and is hunted by the dead, carrying out the will of Death.
- It took five days to build the house of the heroine, played by Kristen Cloke. Residents of Vancouver liked it so much that they even asked the filmmakers not to destroy it, as originally planned.
- The news program shown in the film features the very same report from the broadcast schedule of July 17, 1996, which reported on the crash of a Trans World Airlines Boeing 747 over New York.
- At the beginning of the film, Devon Sawa (who played Alex) was supposed to pretend to be asleep. At that moment, he actually fell asleep.
- It took five days to create the shot of Alex's bedside clock, in which the numbers indicating midnight turn into the number 180.
- The scene with the fizzing Alka-Seltzer tablets, after Terry (played by Amanda Detmer) is hit by a bus, had to be extended so that the audience could recover.
- In the scene where Valeri, played by Kristen Cloke, is stabbed with a knife, the actress lay under a false floor, with a mannequin positioned above her, into which the knife was plunged.
- The role of Alex could have gone to Tobey Maguire, and the role of Claire to Kirsten Dunst.
- At the airport, a woman tells Alex that the flight will depart at 9:25, which perfectly coincides with his birthday (September 25th – 09/25 in the American date format). On the plane, Alex is assigned seat I (the ninth letter of the alphabet) in row 25.
- The scene where Carter hits Billy in the face was added to the script due to production necessity. The reason was that actor Sean William Scott developed a cold sore on his lip that day. To conceal it and avoid disrupting the filming schedule, it was suggested to 'split his lip' during an argument between the characters and cover the sore with fake blood.
- The number '180' appears repeatedly in the film, which is a reference to the project's original title, 'Flight 180'. The distribution company, New Line Cinema, decided to rename the film 'Final Destination' to avoid confusion with other movies, such as 'Air Force One' (Wolfgang Petersen, 1997) or 'Con Air' (Simon West, 1997).
- The airplane sets were constructed on special suspensions that allowed the entire structure to shake. Later, these were dismantled, and the sets for the upper floor of the house of the character played by Ali Larter—through which she runs during the hurricane—were placed on the suspension.
- The scene where Ali Larter's character gets out of the car and runs into Devon Sawa (who played Alex) on the beach was filmed on an actual beach.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
