1- The characters survive the disaster
2- Death comes for them
3- One of them dies and the one that had the premonition begins to put pieces together that Death is coming for them (may or may not have Tony Todd appearing to warn them further/add a new rule)
4- Skepticism among the group
5- More of them dies, skepticism goes out the window
6- Cue the characters working either to prevent themselves from getting killed or to exploit a new rule if the movie added it
7- Big Climax
8- Final scene shows the survivors happy that its all over...
9- Or is it? Turns out they didnt cheat death and its still coming for them! OH NO!
10- They die
11- The End
I watched all these movies while growing up and I can say that altho I did like some of them, the formula is really predictable and it really doesnt make sense on the grand scheme. So you'd think FD 6 would add new stuff, right?
So to recap, among all 5 movies, these rules have been established
1- Death will come at the order people were supposed to get killed (with some exceptions). It was initially believed that it would skip you if its attempt on your life failed but the ending of FD1 established that once its cycle is complete, it will just redo it with the survivors until they all die
2- "Only new Life can defeat Death" - Now, it was believed this rule was about bringing a new life into this world, thus forcing Death to leave you be or something but not only FD2 implies that may not be the case, FD6 seems to confirm its a bogus rules
3- "A life for a life" - aka, if you kill someone, they will take your place in Death's list as now you have the time the person would have left. The drawback is, outside of the legal rammifications of it, that once the life you just took is up, Death will just resume trying to kill you so its only a temporary solution at best.
4- "Resurrection" - At least in the medical sense. If you flat line, be clinically dead for a couple of moments and then be brought back, death will supposedly leave you be (tho you really need to make sure you were indeed clinically dead and not just passed out). This really is the only known way to get out of death's list for good as only a single survivor had been able to officially escape it without any sort of cruel twist.
Well, outside of the unique twist of this happening in the 60's now, the formula of deaths is still the same and Im surprised to see that no new rule is added (if anything, they sort of confirm the "new life" rule is nonsense as death will not only come for you but your progeny now).
And spoilers to those that care
The movie ends exactly like the other 5 end (with maybe the exception being FD2), with the final steps of the formula being reached and death coming out ontop. And they literally bring the logs because they reaaaally want for you to remember the iconic log death scene from FD2 except it doesnt work as well because the FD2 version was grounded enough so that you could buy this happening in real life, FD6's version is very out there so it loses that realistic aspect that made people paranoid of driving behind log trucks. The former can happen in real life (in theory, they had to CG the logs to "bounce" like that but I digess) but the latter is so overly complicated and out there that everyone knows it will never happen.
And its just disappointing because you'd think there would be some progress with this one or some new twists but there just wasnt and the only reason death took so long to reach Iris's and her family was because it was too busy killing other people and their families before it could reach them.
Im also surprised at the lack of references to the previous entries. Seems like every entry minus FD5 referenced at least the events of FD1/Flight 180 as a research base of this whole "premonition leading to deaths" thing and to show that this did happen before in universe. Closest we got was a FD2's survivor being mentioned to still being alive (tho we never see her so what was the point? Sequel hook?) and maybe Iris's book having some drawings that cooould be visual references like a log truck and a plane. It just makes you wonder how many times this has happened and how no one has caught on on the recurrency of "premonition leading to deaths".
Besides, FD4 (or rather "THE Final Destination", as if it was going to be the final and bestest one evah...which it wasnt) implied that Death is the one giving out these visions, which just destroys any ambiguity that it is just doing its job at maintaining some sort of cosmic balance, Death is just doing this because it is a colossal dick. But I also wont discard the possibility that this will (if it hadnt been already) silently retconned given how FD4 is objectively considered the "worst one" in the series.
There is also the fact that its never explained why the "Resurrection" rule even works as Death seems to just do whatever it wants so it begs the question what "forces" Death to obey this particular rule with any cheats of any kind (like giving a heart attack or terminal cancer to the survivor).
But Im just rambling at this point. I know I shouldnt have expected much but, at the same time, what was the point of bringing this series back if we were in for the same ride we had 5 times already? I guess it all comes down to just watching folks get horribly killed by rube goldberg styled traps which, yeah, FD6 does deliver on that so if you are after that, you will be satisfied.
Time will tell if we are getting more after this or if this was just a twitch brought by gases or something
