YMMV / Final Destination

• Alas, Poor Scrappy: After how horrible Ms Lewton was to Alex after he saved her life, it's still very sad and shocking when she gets such a drawn-out death scene.
• Angst? What Angst?:
  • Alex is actually rather okay the morning after his best friend dies. Seeing the body in the morgue is met with mild revulsion, and there's no real moment where Alex mourns Tod. Possibly justified in him being numbed in the 40 days or so since the plane disaster, not having seen Tod since then except at the memorial, the FBI watching him, Lewton and Carter treating him very poorly, Billy (and likely others) treating him like a prophet. When he goes to Tod's house, Tod's father practically blames him for the deaths of Tod and his brother.
  • And right after Billy is decapitated right in front of him, Alex practically ignores it and actually starts getting excited that he may have figured out death's design. It's probably a sign of how desensitized he's become to the whole thing. Carter, by contrast, is left shaken.
• Catharsis Factor: There's something oddly satisfying in watching Stifler being beheaded by a metal scrap.
• Crosses the Line Twice: During Alex's terrifying vision of Flight 180 blowing up, a boombox comes out of nowhere and clocks Tod in the back of the head.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: The Bittersweet Ending that was originally scripted and filmed before a negative test audience reaction has been Vindicated by History following the Too Bleak, Stopped Caring nature of the series as a whole. Many fans prefer that alternate ending where the survivors are Carter, Clear, and Alex's unborn baby and they're safe from future attacks.
• Fanon Discontinuity: A lot of fans these days actually prefer the original ending - with Alex sacrificing himself to save Clear, the latter giving birth to their baby a year later and Carter surviving - finding it more appropriate for the tone the film was going for (plus it would mean more sequel characters escaped Death). This is ironic, as the ending was changed due to negative reactions from test audiences.
• First Installment Wins: This film is usually considered the better one of the FD series (although the second is close in popularity) due to the deaths feeling more realistic and less abused like with the later films, and even developed a sense of atmosphere by comparison. It's the one most likely to be held up as "the scariest" in the franchise.
• Ham and Cheese: Tony Todd as William Bludworth. You could argue that he's playing the man as someone who's deliberately trying to creep the kids out.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Bludworth's ominous "I'll see you soon" as Alex and Clear leave the morgue. It was an Orphaned Reference to Alex originally sacrificing himself to save Clear but after the second movie where Alex died offscreen and Clear soon follows him it becomes even sadder.
  • The plane disaster was already pretty horrifying when the film was released in 2000, but it has only gotten harder to watch after the following two decades saw several high-profile disasters involving planes. Just four months after the film's release, Air France Flight 4590, flying the same Paris-New York route as Flight 180 (albeit in the other direction), crashed just minutes after takeoff in a manner nearly identical to the film's opening disaster. Then, of course, there were the September 11th terrorist attacks that happened eighteen months after the film's release. Alex's initial paranoia would be much more justified if the film was released today.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The poster in the main page. "No accidents. No coincidences. No escapes. Final Destination." In hindsight, it sounds like the meme of stereotyping competitive Super Smash Bros. players (mainly from Super Smash Bros. Melee (2001) onwards) of only playing with a ruleset of "no items, Fox only, Final Destination".
  • The movie was released several years before a manga came out which had a notebook of death that killed people, with optional written instructions of how they should die. Needless to say, many people made jokes about it.
  • Alex is mistaken for stalking Ms Lewton when he's actually checking her house for signs of danger, and Ms Lewton calls him creepy. Devon Sawa would later play an actual stalker in the Eminem video for "Stan".
  • Having an FBI character named Agent Schrek makes for some retroactive giggles considering how much of a meme the most well-known Shrek became.
  • Composer Shirley Walker and Alex's actor Devon Sawa were both part of the Child's Play franchise. Walker had conducted Graeme Revell's score for Child's Play 2, while Sawa plays a quadruple role in the franchise's 2021 spin-off television series for USA/Syfy, Chucky.
  • Terry inadvertently walking out into the street as she angrily cusses out one of the other characters only to immediately get hit by a bus brings to mind a similar scene from another teen movie that wouldn’t come out for another four years.
• Hollywood Homely: Late 90s, early 2000s super hottie Ali Larter is given a dull brown hairstyle with an unflattering fringe, and baggy clothes to suggest she's an outsider who Alex wouldn't have noticed beforehand. Notably in the ending in Paris (which was filmed months later), Ali had reverted to being blonde and looks like a supermodel again.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Carter starts off as a Jerk Jock and bully. Then he loses his girlfriend, whom he genuinely cared about and he's that terrified of having no control over his life. So in utter terror he decides to die on his own terms by having a train hit him and his car but almost dies after changing his mind before being saved by Alex. Not only that but his car gets destroyed and Billy dies instead. He then performs a gradual Heel–Face Turn only to die for real shortly afterwards.
  • Ms Lewton is a real piece of work with how she blames Alex for the accident itself and shuns him, even calling the cops on him just for being outside her house. But she has an especially big case of survivor's guilt, since she put Larry back on the plane, and she was supposed to be responsible for all the teenagers that died on it.
• Moral Event Horizon: Death crossed it when it blew up a plane with a baby on board. Although, it might have crossed it WAY before that.
• Narm:
  • Ms. Lewton threatening the prophet in the airport is done quite over-the-top, as if Kristen Cloke wanted to do her best Hannibal Lector impression.
  • Carter's ham-fisted "I control my life!" declaration to Alex in the middle of a memorial service for their dead friends. Overall Carter's fear of dying young is hammered in so much it borders on Anvilicious. He also then says "I'm never gonna die" like a supervillain who's discovered immortality.
  • Ms. Lewton's same delivery of "Get away from me kid, you scare the hell out of me!" - as if the audience wouldn't get that Ms. Lewton is afraid of Alex without her announcing it dramatically.
  • Clear telling Alex that she gets a rush from breaking into the morgue. She then clarifies that it's because she's doing something she's not supposed to. As if the audience wouldn't guess without her spelling it out for them.
  • There's also Clear's abrupt about face in thinking after visiting the morgue, where she randomly decides to think that Tod killed himself. She was the one trying to convince Alex that there was some kind of meaning in his premonition, and she was the only one who believed him in the first place.
• Narm Charm:
  • The name 'Clear Rivers' has induced many giggles and Who Names Their Kid "Dude"? reactions. But she was named after the director's assistant, and she's probably one of the most iconic characters in the franchise. The wacky name kind of fits.
  • Ms Lewton's death is so over the top that it's almost Bloody Hilarious for some. But the fact that it's so brutal is what still makes it a horrifying sequence.
• Paranoia Fuel: How about knowing you just witnessed your own death on the plane you're on and people are actively trying to stop you from leaving and saving yourself? And of course not knowing which one of you could be next.
• Signature Scene:
  • The Plane explosion, which set the bar for the franchise's "Mass Death Premonition" scenes.
  • Terry getting splattered by the bus. Jump Scares have a bad reputation of being used as cheap tricks, but the scene is so well done that it can still make you jolt if you haven't seen it in a while, but still know it's coming. As noted throughout this movie's pages, it scared and shocked test audiences so badly the shot of the Alka Seltzer dissolving in water was added to give some recovery time from what happened.
• Stoic Woobie: Clear when you hear about her horrible home life and the fact that she has no apparent friends at school - and how little she complains about it. She's actually the least angsty character in the film.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The aftermath of the disaster is palpable with the cast after they've survived: Tod is shown slowly trying to keep it together after his brother's death, Ms. Lewton's dealing with survivor's guilt, and mid-way after being taken home, Alex enters his bedroom...and just breaks down crying as he's embraced by his parents. A huge contrast of what the movie would later on show.
  • Clear has to be dropped home by Alex's family because she has no one to collect her from the airport. She's a teenage girl, narrowly avoided a fatal accident and has to go home to an empty house.
  • There's a sequence of everyone's parents coming to the airport to pick them up, and you see even a goofball like Billy or a bully like Carter hugging them tightly. Harsher in Hindsight for the ones that lose their children again through the course of the film.
  • Clear opens up to Alex about how her father was killed by a mugger, and her mother ended up with an abusive new boyfriend who convinced her to abandon her daughter. She then wonders if there's an alternate universe out there where her father was never killed and the accident never happened.
  • Carter going to the memorial for the dead students to carve Terry's name onto it.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Terry gets virtually no characterization beyond Carter's Satellite Love Interest, and the shocking bus crash death. Despite being one of the main protagonists, she's never seen interacting with anyone besides Carter or Alex, and no attempt is made to get to know her as an independent person.
• Unintentional Period Piece: After the 9/11 attacks, no plane explosion would be ruled an accident so quickly, and the survivors would be put under a much stricter surveillance. More mundanely, Alex is seen reading Penthouse magazine instead of looking up porn on the internet. Cell phones and social media would also make communication between the characters much easier.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Ms. Lewton really comes this way mid-way in the film. While it's argued that she's still stemming from heavy survivor's guilt caused by the plane crash, never once does she thank Alex or acknowledge that he got six people off the plane but instead tells him that he "scares her" and even ends up calling the FBI agents on him. Unsurprisingly, she gets one of the more crueler deaths for her efforts.
• Values Dissonance: Alex tries to debunk the idea that Tod committed suicide by telling his parents that they'd made plans, which obviously he wouldn't have done if he'd been planning to kill himself. Even though Alex was right, greater awareness of mental health problems make Alex's statement seem very callous - since the most common myth surrounding suicide is that there are obvious signs. Tod killing himself after seeming fine earlier is par the course for a lot of suicide victims who fake happiness to mask their problems. Alex also sees in the morgue that he has marks on his fingers from trying to pull the rope out, using that as proof as well - as if it's impossible for someone to have second thoughts about suicide.
• The Woobie:
  • Alex. He spends the first half of the film hiding the trauma of the disaster at bay, stalked by the FBI, his teacher is terrified of him, his best friend dies from "suicide" and said friend's family somehow blames him for it. All because he prevented six people from dying.
  • Clear, which extends to the second film as well.

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