Final Destination Bloodlines

From the Premonition, to the Visionary, to the unfortunate souls who find themselves on Death’s list, nothing is the same, and everything is up in the air.

This entry opens in the 60s, focusing on Iris (Brec Bassinger) and Paul Campbell (Max Lloyd-Jones), out on a date to the newly constructed Skyview Tower. This trendy restaurant, as noted by the helpful elevator operator, was completed five months ahead of schedule and is considered the place to be. A modern marvel set hundreds of feet into the air? What could possibly go wrong? It is here where we have our first major divergence.

While the novels and comics based on the franchise have taken more interesting paths with the material, the films have primarily stuck to what makes a film successful. It offers a few complex ideas and scenarios, but until Bloodlines, it steered away from changing too much. True, the stealth prequel aspect of 5 set it as the earliest disaster, but Bloodlines takes it further. The Premonition was seen by Iris, but in the modern day, her granddaughter, Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), is having the same vision.

As the film goes on, however, we soon learn that Stefani is not a Visionary in the vein of the previous protagonists. She is, in essence, akin to Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) and Lori Milligan (Shantel VanSanten) from the first two films and the fourth, respectively. Next to their Visionaries, they are intuitive without having the ability to see the future, letting them pick up on the signs and clues that death is near. Stefani cannot see the future, but she could, to a reasonable degree, predict what was going to happen. While this leaves her at a clear disadvantage throughout the film, it ironically makes her no more or less effective than Alex, Wendy, Nick, or Sam. After all, Kimberly is the only one to have effectively used her abilities to not only figure out the Design, but the rules of the game. This film neatly confirms that she survived, and since Thomas Burke was after her, it is left vague. Still, until otherwise indicated, I will go with him surviving, too.

Context clues indicate that it did not get to Iris until the 2000s. Comparing her efforts to every Protagonist, Visionary or not, it becomes clear that she was not merely the most effective, she was Death’s most compelling opponent on the gameboard. It is Iris’ character where my biggest disappointment with the film comes in, and why I feel a two-hour runtime would have been acceptable. I wanted to spend more time with Brec Bassinger and Gabrielle Rose in this film. While Brec gets the showstopping disaster scene, Gabrielle’s fractured performance set decades later is given just enough to leave you wanting more.

The next major divergence from the other films is the cast. Every single member on Death’s list this time is part of a family, the Campbell-Reyes branches, all descendants of Iris and Paul. Howard Campbell (Alex Zahara) is the patriarch of the family, a fun, easygoing guy who is still dealing with the trauma that resulted from his mother’s antics and his father’s early death. His wife, Brenda (April Telek), is supportive and caring, but also willing to set aside her husband’s reasons for not contacting Iris to let Stefani make that decision for herself.

Howard and Brenda’s three children are Erik (Richard Harmon), Julia (Anna Lore), and Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner). All of them are directly implied to be older than Stefani’s younger brother Charlie (Teo Briones), a high school senior eagerly anticipating his senior prom. Stefani and Charlie’s mother, Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt), offers another glimpse into how the family dealt with Iris. Where Howard became a guy who smiles through it all, Darlene became anxious and distant, deciding to live in an RV and travel the country. All of this led to her children and ex-husband, Marty Reyes (Tinpo Lee), having a strained relationship. Stefani’s efforts to deal with her recurring nightmares and insomnia push her to step back into the family, only to realize that she did precisely what her mother did without realizing it.

It is through this family that we get a glimpse into their dynamic, all of which act as crucial elements to make us truly care about them. In this film, I found that none of the characters are unlikeable, all of their motives and actions were completely understandable, and in the end, it still did not matter. Death comes for everybody in the end.

While Brenda and Marty are immediately not on the list, as they aren’t connected in any way to the Skyview disaster, Stefani soon realizes that everybody else in her family tree is. Iris has been acting as a keystone, whose survival has kept Death at bay for decades to protect her family and William Bludworth (Tony Todd, also played by Jayden Oniah in 1969). As the deaths begin to mount, those who survive make a bid to find Bludworth, whom Iris wrote about in her journals as a man she had been working with to figure out how to survive. It is here where the film threads back many of its storylines, while acting as a final goodbye to Todd, who had already known he was dying.

With this story, we now learn that Bludworth has been on Death’s List since Iris saved him. Having died after her in the Premonition, he has lived his entire life knowing that when she dies, he will follow soon thereafter. Each time he appeared, in 1, 2, and 5, he offered tidbits of information to those who survived disasters because of foreknowledge. Now, we know why. He had been testing theory after theory to find the one that would get him and Iris off Death’s list. Every theory proffered as fact, when viewed in hindsight, truly wasn’t offered as a fact. They were suggestions based on decades of knowledge. Final Destination 2 established that only new life could forestall Death, and Bloodlines, set twenty-plus years later, does not discount that detail. Instead, it clarifies it further. While 2 introduced a pregnant woman as a ray of hope, only to reveal that she was not intended to die in the Highway Pileup, we see that Bludworth had good reason to suggest that in 2001. He and Iris were still alive because every time somebody related to a Skyview Tower survivor had a child, Death started over. It might have looked, for a long while, that Death had simply stopped.

Final Destination Bloodlines took a leap with its story, offering something that viewers could not merely get behind but genuinely enjoy. If a sequel is greenlit, this is the team that I would love to see return – even if the story doesn’t delve into the many adventures of a Young Iris and Bludworth and takes another unfortunate group’s unwitting survival or a thrill ride.