Final Destination 5 (2011)

Final Destination 5 arrives with a suspension bridge, a high wind, and a young man named Sam who sees the future and ruins it for everyone. He saves eight coworkers from the collapse, which is generous of him, and then spends the remainder of the running time watching them die in the order they were supposed to. The survivors work for a paper company and are headed to a corporate retreat, a detail the film treats as logistics. Nobody here learns anything about labor, ownership, or the extraction of surplus value. The office is simply a place where people stand near machinery.

The deaths are the product. A gymnast's routine ends badly. A laser eye surgery machine malfunctions with the enthusiasm of a machine that has been waiting its whole life. A wrench achieves ballistic flight. A decorative Budai statue becomes an instrument of the inevitable. Tony Todd returns as the mortician Bludworth to explain the rules: death requires balance, and the survivors can steal a stranger's remaining years by killing them. He delivers this as procedure, not as moral instruction. The film has no interest in teaching us how to live. It has an interest in the sequence of events, and it pursues that interest with an attention to craft that would be admirable in a less morbid context.

The final turn reveals that all of this happened before the first film, and that Sam and Molly have boarded Flight 180. The reveal is elegant, mean, and entirely structural. There is no message here, no corrective for society, no invitation to examine our assumptions about anything at all. There is a bridge, a list, and a schedule. It is a machine that runs on our attention, and it runs clean. The audience files out having received exactly what was promised, which is more than most films manage, and less than the culture requires of them these days. No homework assigned. No notes taken. Just the order of death, faithfully observed.

(Reviewer's note: the picture contains no discernible social programming of the contemporary variety, and scores accordingly.)

{"thematic_tags": ["sequel"]}