Thursday, March 9, 2006

Ilkka on Final Destination 2

I like reading Ilkka Kokkarinen's blog Sixteen Volts, mainly because his take on things is so different from mine. I feel especially out of sync with him when he writes about art and pop culture. For instance, he judges sci-fi novels in terms of the accuracy of their predictions, which I think is kind of wrong way to approach science fiction.

However, today he wrote about the movie Final Destination 2 in a way that almost makes me want to see it - I've avoided it mainly because I thought the original Final Destination (which I saw in the theater) was one of the lamest movies I've ever experienced. Anyways, here's Ilkka on FD2:

The very premise of the movie, that there is no monster in a rubber suit lurking around but the whole physical reality itself is the monster that tries to kill our main characters as impersonally as gravity pulling down a rock thrown in the air, acting teleologically but constrained to obey the laws of physics (for example, a knife can't just jump out the drawer and fly through the air to slash your throat), is absolutely brilliant. If the Matrix movies inspired books of philosophical essays, the premise of this movie should also inspire at least a few blog posts.

No matter where you run, you can't escape the fact that you are still inside the physical reality. Thus the only way to try to survive is to live in a specially constructed safehouse that doesn't contain anything that the physical reality could potentially use as a weapon. But is this really living? Add to this the excellent special effects when the death eventually catches the teens one by one, and the result is a truly excellent movie.


Anyone else feel this way about FD2? Anyone know of any other horror movies that work in a similar way?

1 comment:

Jon Hastings said...

Heh - don't worry: I take full responsibility for all my viewing choices. Thanks for the comment and the clarification, though.