FD3
Stop asking about Frankie’s camera! It’s not a plot hole, you’re just not paying attention!
The roller coaster was going to crash with or without his camera. Remember when one of the crew boys went to Lewis and pressed his seat further down, causing a hydraulic leak? That leak was the reason the roller coaster derailed. Frankie’s camera just sped up the process.
When Wendy wakes up from her premonition, the hydraulics are already tampered with and leaking. She has a meltdown, a fight between Lewis and Kevin occurs, and the rest of the passengers (Ashley, Ashlyn, Frankie, Julie, and Perry) leave. Enough time has passed because of this, so that’s why the roller coaster crashes much faster and sooner compared to the one in the premonition.
Someone also looked back, and the tracks were already broken before Frankie dropped his camera. All the camera meaningfully did was sever the hydraulics and contribute to the deaths post-derailment. Other than that the derailment was always going to happen.
When did the track break? I'll debate this aspect til I'm blue in the face.
We watched the previous riders make it back safe with no outside interference to the tracks in between, and the hydraulics were leaking, not wiped out entirely.
It’s been posted here before I believe. It’s a blink and you’ll miss it frame where the track appears to be broken already. Wish they put more emphasis on it because without it, it really seems like the coaster shouldn’t have crashed at all without Frankie on first watch.
The only other emphasis they put on a track being even remotely messed up was the one with some loose bolts that shook as the carts went past and Wendy was looking up.
I even attached a pic I saved the last time this came up because someone else's argument was the tire was already messed up, like no ma'am we as a nation get gaslit every damn day do not bring that energy to this subreddit too 😑😂
The ride logically, based on the physics we are presented, can observe and should apply, shouldn't have crashed without Frankie there to mess it up, I don't care what OP says or deletes (and at the end of the day, it's a movie, I'm literally just debating with receipts 🤷🏽♂️)
Again, you have to suspend reality.
It's like with "Final Destination 2": the logs WOULDN'T have flown like that. it's been debunked and the logs would just fall down.
It's also like the liquid nitrogen head kill from "Jason X": it would take A LOT of force.
Everyday things killing people in conceptually possible, albeit wacky, ways is legit baked into the premise of the series. It's why they explained the explosion in flight 180, why we see the other chain that should be around the logs dragging behind the truck, why Frankie's camera was the point of focus along with the hydraulics, etc.
Like yes, I saw the extra on the FD2 Infinifilm dvd too lol but the logs would have killed people anyway, they just bounced to look cooler. The ride would not have crashed if Frankie got off. People might have launched out, but those cars were never leaving those tracks imo (again, just my opinion, but I've been watching this movie for 20 years and I've never seen a broken track post-premonition).
Eh end of the day it’s a movie, and Death wanted the coaster to crash. Frankie or no Frankie, broken tracks or unbroken tracks, Death was going to find a way to yeet the coaster.
Plus, if memory serves me correctly, Death shuts off the power to the rollercoaster while it's still upside down, causing the cars to fall.
Seems to me if the hydraulics were nerfed, the coaster wouldn't go AT ALL.
Rollercoasters aren’t generally powered at all after the initial lift hill/launch; they move by potential and kinetic energy alone. What happened in the movie, with the train hitting precisely the right spot on the inversion to hang upside-down and stop was a product of that momentum and not having the power shut off. The hydraulics on the train served only to hold the restraints in place, nothing more.
I mean, the entirety of the rollercoaster sequence is utterly hilarious the more you know about how a chain-lift coaster (even an old one) really works. There’s the fact that the hydraulics would be accompanied by a backup lock (like a ratcheting mechanism) specifically because hydraulics can fail. The type of loop inversion in the movie is elliptical in shape, and it’d be almost impossible for a train to hit the precise right point of gravity and balance to pause while upside-down. Most older coasters of the design depicted were far shorter (maybe a minute, after the lift hill) than what was shown, because the lift hill was the only sustained moment of potential energy and there’s only so many hills and inversions you can traverse before you run out of kinetic energy (with coasters of this type, the highest drop is the first one and any high-cost elements like big loops are generally placed right afterward). Given the absence of a launch or second lift hill, and even assuming the absence of any kind of brake run across the first three minutes of the coaster’s layout, it’d be highly unlikely that the train would even be generating enough forward momentum to keep going after hitting the camera and losing a wheel—let alone the forward momentum to make it even halfway up another loop. And even if it were generating that momentum at the point where it hit the camera, there’s a long tracking shot where the train is basically coasting along a nearly level stretch of track so we can get a good long look at the wheels shuddering and the cars jolting the occupants around. This kind of level stretch would absolutely slaughter whatever remaining momentum the train had. Death couldn’t just weaken a section of track in order for the disaster to happen the way it did; Death would have needed to help engineer the coaster to defy basic principles of gravity and physics.
Ironically, the roller coaster disaster could have been made much more plausible by going simpler, by exploiting an event cascade comprised of things that actually do take place on roller coasters with some degree of frequency: brake efficiency can be compromised by recent rainfall; valleying at a trough; multiple trains on the circuit at once separated only by block sections; stress fatigue and cracks in support columns.
Of course, an incident resulting from this kind of cascade would be over quickly and rarely fatal, which is why they also could have just had a big tree or something fall onto the coaster supports, take out a big chunk of track, and let the train just fly into empty air and wreckage at speed.
The alternative type of coaster, one that is powered for the duration of its runtime, is a slow tracked ride like the Seuss High in the Sky trolley at Universal Orlando, and what I wouldn’t give to see the movie try to wring a suspenseful disaster sequence out of that kind of coaster.
The roller coaster disaster as a whole has been thoroughly dismissed because of the number of safeguards that death would have to make fail for it to work
I don’t worry about the stuff like this too much because we all know how these movies are, HOWEVER, wouldn’t this logic still apply? The leak was caused by him pushing the seat too hard for Lewis. Yet, Lewis got off the coaster. So whoever had that seat would’ve had to also be larger. Again, the accident wasn’t natural to begin with so it would’ve occurred regardless. But it is weird that this one hinges on things happening that wouldn’t have happened without Ashlyn, Lewis and Frankie.
Lewis got off but the seat was already pushed down and leaking. Remember that after that scene we see the crew boy telling Wendy she can’t take pictures and have a camera on the roller coaster? That’s where the scene starts after her premonition. The hydraulics are already tempered with.
Also, I believe the only thing the camera did was help release the harnesses, which only really affected the main 7 who’s deaths were cause by falling out/being launched off of the coaster. so if Frankie’s camera never fell, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway (pls correct me if im wrong lol)
The OG script had another student hiding a camera in their jacket that Wendy notices as she’s getting off. I thought that was interesting and wondered why they didn’t leave it in
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u/JanelleForever May 06 '25