William Bludworth! Kurn, son of Mogh! Candyman! Zoom! Adult Jake Sisko! And more, more, more! R.I.P., good sir.

Once upon a time the original Final Destination was my favorite film I saw in theaters in the year 2000, outranking other notable releases such as the Best Picture-winning Gladiator, the higher-budgeted X-Men, and the even more intricate Chicken Run. Created by screenwriter Jeffrey Reddick and flown to the finish line by the X-Files/Millennium writer/producer team of Glen Morgan and James Wong, the supernatural slasher-flick was more than its novelty of teens being hunted by the voiceless, incorporeal force of Death Itself via ludicrous chain-reaction accidents. Sure, those grotesque executions were more unpredictable than your typical arsenal of cutlery and farming tools, and as a comics fan I took some pride in knowing Rube Goldberg’s work before I saw it and name-checking him for comparison’s sake before everyone else was doing it.

Taking a peculiar place in the post-Scream slasher revival, the imaginative precursor to 1000 Ways to Die posed a loftier pretension than psychopathic B-movie slaughter. Death’s unspoken yet swiftly inferred motive for its Most Dangerous Game kill-spree was, arguably in the strictest sense, not motivated by pure or even petty evil. From a higher plane of perspective, the entire cast was “supposed” to die in the first twenty minutes, which would’ve made for a fairly pointless short. As the students who escaped the opening plane disaster soon find themselves perishing one by one, their increasingly frantic debates and rationalizations explore the time-honored thematic conflict of destiny versus free will — the integrity of maintaining The Grand Scheme of Things versus the Terminator series’ philosophy of “There is no fate but what we make”, which in turn was backstabbed by Terminator 3‘s contrarian stance that some catastrophes are a fixed point in time, no matter how hard we push back.

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