High school student Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) boards Volée Airlines flight 180 with his classmates for a trip to Paris from JFK Airport. In his seat, he has a premonition that the plane will explode, killing everyone on board. When details of his vision begin to happen, he panics and is involved with a fight with his rival Carter Horton (Kerr Smith) and both are kicked off the plane. His best friend Tod Waggner (Chad E. Donella), Carter’s girlfriend Terry Chaney (Amanda Detner), their teacher Valerie Newton (Kristen Cloke), and two other students named Billy Hitchcock (Seann William Scott) and Clear Rivers (Ali Lartner) join them. Of course, the plane blows up and everyone on board is dead. They are interrogated by two FBI agents named Weine (Daniel Roebuck) and Schrek (Roger Glenveur Smith), who are suspicious of the whole story.
Thirty-nine days later, following the memorial service for the victims, a series of minor events in a chain of Rube Goldberg-style chain reactions causes Tod to be hanged in his shower. His death is ruled a suicide. Alex sneaks into the funeral home with Clear to examine his corpse. The mortician, William Bludworth (a seriously creepy Tony Todd) is of the opinion that those who escaped the plane-crash owe retribution to Death for upsetting his plan, and Death will soon be taking them all. The group of students gets together outside a café and Terry is run over by a bus.
It seems they are dying in the order of their predicted deaths on the plane. Valerie Lewton is impaled by a falling kitchen knife, and her house blows up. Carter, who is next in line, is upset by Terry’s loss and tries to kill himself by stopping his car on a train crossing. He changes his mind at the last minute, but his seat-belt jams. Alex manages to save him, but shrapnel from the train decapitates Billy. Because Alex interfered with Carter’s fate, Death skipped to the next in line. The next day, hiding in a cabin, Alex remembers that he switched seats on the plane and Clear is next. He rushes to her house, pursued by Weine and Schrek. Clear is trapped inside her car, surrounded by loose electrical cables and spilled gasoline. He gets her out of the car just before it explodes.
Six months later, Alex, Clear, and Carter travel to Paris to celebrate having survived. Alex reveals that Death never skipped him after he saved Clear. Afraid that it’s not over, Alex backs off when a bus knocks a parking sign toward them. Carter pulls Alex out of the way, but Carter is killed instead. Death’s plan is on track.
The film was directed by James Wong, his first film, the screenplay written by him, Glen Morgan, and Jeffrey Reddick, based on Reddick’s story. It had been written for an episode of the X-files, but a colleague at New Line Cinema persuaded Reddick to write it as a film. It was a financial success despite being panned by critics and received the Saturn Award for Best Horror Film, and Sawa received one as Best Young Actor. Eventually, it produced four more movies, several novels and comic books. The whole story was based on the 1996 crash of TWA 800, in which 16 students and 5 teachers from the same high school died, and Reddick’s reading of a story in which someone had a premonition of another crashed plane.
Most of the characters are named after famous horror-film directors, actors, and producers—Lon Chaney, Alfred Hitchcock, Val Lewton, Tod Browning, Friedrich Murnau, Carl Dreyer, Don Siegel, and George Waggner. Weine is German for crying, and Schreck means Scare (as in Max Schreck of Nosferatu), so the FBI agents are named for tears and fears. The hope was to avoid a slasher movie by having no killer. They wanted to do for planes what Jaws did for Sharks. Death uses everyday objects and whatever is available for the inevitable deaths. The music of John Denver, who died in a plane-crash, is used throughout the movie. Ali Larter appeared in the Resident Evil series and Tony Todd in the Star Trek, D.C. and Marvel universes, and he was Candyman. Vancouver International airport played JFK.
The sets built for the Rube Goldberg-like death scenes were built skewed or out of perspective to make them feel disturbing. The music was one of the few things critics liked, but Roger Ebert gave the film four stars. Alex was supposed to be asleep in the opening scene and actor Devon Sawa actually fell asleep for four hours. Mrs. Lewton’s house was built in five days in Vancouver. The neighbors didn’t want it blown up because it was so nice. Much of the news footage is real film about plane crashes. Tod means death in German. Clear’s cabin was in the movie Lake Placid (1999). The luggage cart near the plane is number 666. The film was released before 9-11 and probably would not have been released afterward. Alex is almost killed seven times.
The whole series probably qualifies as a guilty pleasure, but I love the absurdity of the death scenes, which increases as the series goes on, and then is wrapped up brilliantly at the end. One thing, perhaps, to keep in mind: most of the deaths involve things that should have been kept in better repair. Alfred G. Vanderbilt cancelled his trip on board the Titanic in 1912, but three years later died on the Lusitania. A story insists that a stoker named “Lucks” Towers survived the sinking of the Titanic, the Lusitania, and the Empress of Ireland. Winston Churchill said an inner voice told him not to sit in his usual seat in a car, which seat was destroyed by a falling bomb. Adolf Hitler wrote that he was warned to change places in a trench in World War One, in which everyone was killed by a shell except him.