Final Destination Bloodlines ★★★☆☆

Everyone knows me and my friend Abbas would not shut up about wanting to see this film. As big fans of this franchise, I was super excited to see we were getting a new film that hopefully beat a lot of the bad sequels with the expanded budget and the new CGI that would definitely be an improvement from the last few films. Even the first looks at this movie from the 'shot for IMAX' trailers showed such an upgrade in camera work to where I knew this was going to be an improvement from the past few films. The story is pretty simple, a family learns they were never supposed to be born after their grandmother years ago had a premonition that saved countless of lives that were not meant to be saved in the first place. Now that people in the family are dying, it is up to them to learn from their grandma who survived years ago how to stop the curse. I will say, the story was much more put together than any of the previous films (which is great because I could not sit through another FD 4 or even most of 5) since they broke from the repetitive formula. I absolutely loved the main characters of this film as they were developed well throughout, and the cast was very strong to where you actually feel a bit of compassion when a lot of them die in insane and graphic ways. Speaking of the kills, my god this movie was definitely much more graphic than the past few ones. The kills were also much more creative this time around, emphasis on the MRI scene, and I had to almost look away at that one which I never do for Final Destination films. For negatives, while the story was still much better than previous films, the pacing was a bit off and this made some of the kills pretty rushed. Another negative would have to be the CGI usage. It wasn't bad at all and made all the kills insanely gory like the previous ones, however it was so over-the-top for certain kills to where it felt unserious and a bit laughable. That's just a personal thing however so I didn't take off points for it. As for the format, I did see this film in IMAX since I wanted to see a horror film in IMAX and this movie was shot in the format, and I will say it was definitely the right choice. There was a surprising amount of good cinematography in this film, especially for the Skyview scenes, and those scenes alone deserved the IMAX watch. The sound design was on the lower side with a lot less bass and punch than I imagined, but that was the only dissapointing thing about the IMAX experience for this film. All the kills were displayed in the 1.90 AR and most of the cinematic shots were too, although there were definitely some shots in between kills that could have benefitted from the IMAX AR. Overall, this was a solid film that is definitely one of the better ones in the franchise, and seeing it in a premium format is a must for a fun time!