This Is Still the Most Iconic Final Destination Moment

The Final Destination movies make death itself into a slasher movie villain, and the bridge collapse premonition of 2011’s Final Destination 5 is the franchise’s ultimate showcase of pure terror. The premonition that kicks off Final Destination 5‘s story begins like any other in the series, with a group of (mostly young) characters proceeding into what they expect to be a normal day only for death to have other plans. In the case of Final Destination 5, that takes the form of a company retreat which the movie’s main characters are traveling to via bus. Unfortunately, they have the terrible luck of driving over a bridge undergoing some common road work right as high winds strike.

Fortunately, the movie’s lead protagonist Sam (Nicholas D’Agosto) experiences a premonition of the coming disaster, enabling him and his friends to get off the bridge just in time. Unfortunately, as the group learns from Tony Todd’s mysterious funeral home owner William Bludworth, death is never pleased when any of its intended victims escape, and is coming for each of the survivors of the bridge collapse. Despite being in the fifth movie of a horror movie series predicated on grisly, horrific deaths, Final Destination 5‘s bridge collapse premonition is still the most iconic sequence of the whole franchise.

Final Destination 5‘s Bridge Collapse Is the Scariest Premonition of the Franchise

The bridge collapse of Final Destination 5 begins in a situation that many people find at least a little nerve-wracking, that being crossing over a suspension bridge several hundred feet over a river. Even with the knowledge of modern engineering and metallurgy making such bridges quite safe for cars and buses to cross over, the innate fear of falling that is ingrained into every human since birth provides the basis for why Final Destination 5‘s premonition is so scary. The only thing worse than falling to one’s death is having a massive structure like a bridge being pulled out from under you to make it happen, or even having its remains collapse on top of you after your plunge.

Final Destination 5 takes the inherently frightening scenario of being on a collapsing bridge and makes it into one of the most viscerally real death sequences of the whole franchise. What makes it even better and worse at the same time is that unlike many of death’s diabolical kills in the Final Destination series, the bridge collapse actually gives its characters a genuine fighting chance for survival. Being aboard an exploding plane, riding an out-of-control rollercoaster, or locked in a tanning booth rapidly heating to supernova levels, there isn’t much one can do except pray for a quick and painless death. At other points in the Final Destination franchise, death plays a little more generously, with its victims having some kind of shot at survival, such as in the log truck sequence of Final Destination 2 or the day at a race car track gone bad in The Final Destination. In Final Destination 5, the bridge collapse shows death simultaneously at its cruelest and most merciful. The characters have a real chance to make it to safety, or even survive falling into the river below, but at every turn, death throws an obstacle in their way that slows their evacuation efforts until it is too late.

[RELATED: Final Destination Deaths Ranked by How Bad They Would Hurt]

The Bridge Collapse’s Effectiveness Is Enhanced by the Movie’s Use of 3D

Like The Final Destination before it, Final Destination 5 was also released in 3D, with the clear aim of adding even more shock value to the franchise’s extremely gory (often to the point of being cartoonishly over-the-top) deaths. However, Final Destination 5 was also released during the 3D craze of the early 2010’s, following the tremendous success of James Cameron’s 3D sci-fi epic Avatar. While the 3D in The Final Destination and Final Destination 5 is very well-executed, the latter’s jumps out just a bit more due to the horror of the bridge collapse that is the movie’s premonition. In turn, the 3D of Final Destination 5 also makes each death on the movie’s bridge collapse hit even harder with just how much it puts the reality of the situation in the audience’s face.

Characters are skewered by rebar, sliced in half by sheet metal, burned alive by hot tar, and impaled on the sail mast of a boat passing under the bridge, all of which become that much more visceral and realistic with the movie’s 3D causing each death to jump right into the viewer’s face. Even the less graphic deaths like Isaac (P.J. Byrne) being aboard the bus as it falls into the river and Olivia (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood) being under the path of a falling car after she survives falling into the river register as the terrible impact deaths they are. Additionally, even without 3D glasses on, the 3D of Final Destination 5 is integrated into the movie so well that it still has a 3D-esque effect with each death in the movie, including those in Sam’s bridge collapse premonition.

The Bridge Collapse Captures the Viciousness of Death in the Final Destination Universe

Like no other premonition or death sequence in the Final Destination franchise, the bridge collapse of Final Destination 5 showcases the sheer sadism of death dialed up to 20. The Final Destination movies consistently do a phenomenal job both at turning the mundane into the lethal, as well as turning normal scenarios with some level of risk connected to them into nightmarish slaughters. Final Destination 5’s bridge collapse combines both in a way matched only by the plane explosion that sets off the series (and which even makes an unexpected return in Final Destination 5‘s ending).

Airplanes and bridges are similar in that people around the world set foot on them every day, with little-to-no tragedy resulting. We know that extensive safety measures are taken for each of them, and that statistically the chances of dying while on either a commercial airliner or even on the most massive of suspension bridges are microscopic at best. Like the exploding airplane of Final Destination, the bridge collapse premonition of Final Destination 5 is the one to posit the scenario of, “But here’s how scary that would be if it happened.”

The Final Destination series is full of graphic horror movie deaths that sear into a viewer’s mind forever, but Final Destination 5’s bridge collapse is cut from a different cloth with its extremely gut-wrenching deaths wrapped in a premonition. Even worse, it shows that death is perfectly happy to tease its victims by preying on them in situations where survival is entirely possible and even likely, adding to the iconography of Final Destination 5‘s bridge collapse premonition.

All the Final Destination movies are available to stream on Max, and Final Destination Bloodlines will be released in theaters on May 16th.

What moment in the Final Destination series most impacted you? Let us know in the comments below!