So as you all may know, we’re big, big fans of the “Star Wars” series. We’ve seen all the movies, all the re-edits and special editions, we (when we say we we mean me) bought all three covers of the TV Guide special edition celebrating “The Phantom Menace,” we’ve seen the animated series, the other animated series, that other animated series with those dumb teddy bears, the animated series with the gay robots, and the current animated series exploring Anakin’s life before he became all evil and melodramatic. Recently we rewatched the entire series on Spike TV here in America and realized that we didn’t enjoy the prequels as much as we remember. I mean I’m definitely in the minority when I say “Attack of the Clones” was watchable, and “Revenge of the Sith” almost (almost) gets in touch with what “Star Wars” is all about, but I sat watching “The Phantom Menace” and… um… yeah, it’s terrible. Terrible. Awful. I mean I still don’t know what the actual plot for that movie was. Seriously, tell me! I decrypted the plot to “2001: A Space Odyssey” faster than I did for this.
Yep this is it, the Final Destination, the alleged final installment in the “Final Destination” franchise that promises to close up the entire storyline. And yes, I’m not buying it either. When there is money to be made, sequels are still a potential cash cow and I think the series will continue to live on when the studios decide it’s time to make some money off of this carnival of cruel and painful deaths. What “The Final Destination” promises is not what it delivers. There are simply no questions answered to the big questions. Who are chosen to receive these premonitions? Are these people just random or do they possess unusual powers or gifts? Are they apart of a legacy or do they just happen to be apart of an accident or misfire? Who or what grants them these premonitions? Does death give it to them as some sort of sick game? And if there is some mystical being granting these people the gift to foretell the next move of death why do they want these people to be one step ahead of death?
There’s something about shooting fish in a barrel, and if any modern equivalent of a movie which lent itself to post-modern bashing more than Avatar does, you might only have truly smug equivalents of Stepin Fetchit, and those examples are self-aware.
As an animated movie, Hanna Barbera could have done much better. “Yogi’s First Christmas” isn’t the worst animated movie I’ve ever seen but in terms of quality, it all feels like such a rushed product that was pushed in to production in time for Christmas. The line work is shaky, the coloring is bland, the character models are fuzzy and there are even a few errors that will give the keen observer a hard time.