When the first Final Destination movie was released in 2000, it was clear that this would be the exciting start of a smart horror franchise about characters being followed around by death. It doesn't really get more horrifying and interesting than that. But while the first film in a franchise is often the most popular, there's something to be said for the third movie which was released in 2006.
In Final Destination 3, Wendy Christensen (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is at an amusement park ready for a night of fun when she has a terrible and scary vision of her peers dying on a rollercoaster. While she is able to get off the ride, the others don't, and she loses her boyfriend Jason Wise (Jesse Moss) and her best friend Carrie Dreyer (Gina Holden). While the Final Destination horror franchise is fun and every film brings something interesting to the table, it's the third movie that is the best one.
The premise of Final Destination 3 is particularly interesting. While every Final Destination movie has death scenes, since a few main characters are able to avoid being killed and then hide from death for the rest of the film, the deaths at the beginning of the third film are especially brutal. When Wendy realizes that her classmates will die in a horrible accident while on a ride, she feels sick and terrified. It's hard not to feel affected by these deaths. It feels like this could really happen and this scene is definitely enough to make audiences wary of going on a rollercoaster. An amusement park is a fun setting for a horror film and that alone makes the movie worth watching as it evokes memories from childhood and high school, making the scary situation that Wendy finds herself in even more relatable.
The main character is also incredibly sympathetic and easy to like. While Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) is a great horror movie protagonist in the first movie, as he gets off the plane before it crashes on the way to Paris and he's the first person to figure out what's going on, Wendy feels particularly interesting. Since Wendy is finishing high school and getting ready to say goodbye to her hometown and go away to college, witnessing this accident and losing her boyfriend and best friend is particularly brutal and sad. This brings more emotion and gravity to the situation and allows audiences to care about her more than some horror movie characters. Wendy is at the beginning of her young adult life and excited for the future but dealing with grief and fear, and the movie does a smart job of showing this throughout the second act.
Final Destination 3 also benefits from being the third movie which makes the horrors that Wendy's peers are experiencing even more terrifying. Erin Ulmer's (Alexz Johnson) terrible death in Final Destination 3 feels inevitable since fans of the franchise have seen so many wild deaths in the previous two movies. Final Destination 3 excels because even though audiences can tell what's going to happen, since every film follows the same formula, the deaths are still shocking and the story is still fun to watch. Audiences still hope that Wendy can stop death in its tracks, even though that seems impossible.
While Final Destination 5 has a smart ending, as the franchise returns to the beginning and audiences see the plane crash from the first movie, the end of Final Destination 3 is also brilliant. Wendy is in college now and on a subway train with her friends, and she has a vision that the train will crash horribly, killing everyone violently. This helps drive home the theme of the horror franchise that death can come anytime for these characters since the universe has decided that it's time for these characters' lives to end. This subway scene is particularly disturbing as there is literally nothing that Wendy can do to stop it.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the franchise creator Jeffrey Reddick talked about the idea of "death" being a character and propelling the horror in these movies. Reddick said, "New Line couldn't get their head around not having a physical antagonist. They're like. 'We just don't get it. 'Death,' you can't see it, you can't fight it.' We're like, 'That's the point!' Finally, I remember Warren Zide saying, 'If you guys pass again, we're taking this to Miramax, and New Line were like, 'We'll buy it!' And the rest is history."
Final Destination is one of the best horror movie franchises because each movie feels familiar yet different, and the third film brings a lot of feeling to the formula of characters trying to beat or cheat death. It will be interesting to see how the new Final Destination movie continues the story.