Upamanyu Biswas
In ‘Final Destination Bloodlines,’ we are introduced to a dazzling high-rise restaurant named The Skyview in the opening scenes, where the young couple, Iris and Paul, look to have a special late afternoon date, not knowing a nightmare awaits them. With Death lurking over everyone’s shoulder, the restaurant soon becomes ground zero for a catastrophe of immeasurable consequences as its inhabitants become helpless victims of brutal accidental deaths. However, despite the seeming negativity surrounding the place, the restaurant stands out in the narrative for its eye-catching appeal and lavish engineering. Additionally, as the narrative progresses, we also learn that the restaurant has deeper implications behind why the protagonist, Stefani, and her extended family are being chased by Death, making it a prominent setting.
The Skyview is a Fictional Restaurant at the Center of the Story
Despite its impressive architecture and unique structural design, the Skyview restaurant in ‘Final Destinations Bloodlines’ is a fictional restaurant created by Guy Busick, Lori Evans Taylor, and Jon Watts. The main reason the building draws attention is its outer facade, which was filmed outside the Harbour Centre skyscraper at 555 West Hastings Street in Vancouver, British Columbia. Visual effects helped modify the fictional building to have a more needle-like appearance at the bottom and the middle while the top remains largely the same. The result is a semi-futuristic building that, despite its impressiveness, also gives off an eerie vibe owing to its questionable structural integrity. This comes to the fore when we see a premonition of the building collapsing in progressive waves of damage, leading to several gruesome deaths for the inhabitants.
While the Skyview’s outer appearance may have been modeled after Harbour Centre, its interiors were essentially taped on meticulously designed production sets. Production designer Rachel O’Toole took cues from a pinball machine when constructing the majestic 1969 high-rise restaurant’s insides, using circles, curves, and lights that look like pinballs. One of the primary inspirations for the design was from the 1960s Trans World Airlines Flight Center at John F. Kenney Airport in New York, a modern engineering marvel brought to life by Mid-Century architect Eero Saarinen. To that end, everything about the Skyview was made to feel elegant, top-of-the-line, expensive, lavish, and out-of-reach. These qualities help juxtapose the chaos inside when the accidents begin.
All in all, six different sets were utilized to film the entire Skyview disaster sequence. One of these sets had a portion of the floor tilted at a 30-degree angle to mirror the situation of the inhabitants in the movie once disaster strikes. To help augment the process further, LED volume wall technology was employed, a state-of-the-art technique used in projects such as Matt Reeves’ ‘The Batman’ and ‘The Mandalorian.’ In an interview, co-director Adam B. Stein said, “I think it’s one of the biggest sets that’s ever been built inside of a volume.” It helps put into perspective the effort and scale of the production process in bringing The Skyview Restaurant to life in the most immersive way possible. However, given how many different locales and studio sets were used in crafting its reality, the restaurant remains a fictional place that cannot be found in real life.
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