Posted in: Movies | Tagged: flatliners, horror, HRL, movie, Review, Supernatural

Flatliners Review: Once Again, A Redo Is Dead On Arrival

Hollywood studio executives seem to continue to be under the impression that any film that was made more than a decade or two ago is ripe for a remake. I'm sure some suit will come along and notice that Trolls and Trolls 2 hasn't been dug out for a redo yet, and we'll get that franchise back whether we like it or not.

So here we are, with Flatliners, a remake of a 1990s film about a group of medical students who decide that a closer look into what happens in the minutes after death. In order to accomplish the feat, they take turns killing each other by stopping their hearts and then a few minutes later, reviving them. This is writer Ben Ripley's first screenplay.

In the original version, which starred Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Kevin Bacon, William Baldwin, and Oliver Platt, once they had been revived, they begin to have harrowing manifestations of the sins each had committed over their lives. This time around we've got Ellen Page, Diego Luna, Nina Dobrev, James Norton, Kiersey Clemons, and once again Sutherland is back into the mix. The same basic bugaboos come out to play, but this time far more as a physical manifestation rather than the purely psychological one of the original.

Whoever gave the actors their character directions seems to have decided that each character should embody every negative aspect of the millennial generation cliché. As Norton's Jamie tosses out about their goals — "I don't want to pay my dues, I'll be an entrepreneur," — they are shallow, uninteresting, and generally unworthy of any form of redemption. When Clemons's Sophia attempts to make amends, she doesn't ask for forgiveness, she simply says, "I need you to forgive me."

While the original dealt with wrestling with genuine contrition, the new one is just once again — they don't want to really have to be bothered with trying to make amends for having been horrible (and in some cases, criminal) in their past; they just need to have their sins forgiven so they can keep on being their unforgivably shallow selves.

I'm calling the film a remake; however it's been also suggested that it was intended as a sequel, as well. Back in 2016, Sutherland said in an interview:

"I play a professor at the medical university. It is never stated but it will probably be very clearly understood that I'm the same character I was in the original Flatliners but that I have changed my name and I've done some things to move on from the experiments that we were doing in the original film."

That might have been the intent, but it's entirely left on the cutting room floor. He exists purely as a external character, one of the professors at the medical school to berate them into giving them motivation to do anything to be worthy of continuing on at the school, and then later to question them about their goings-on. That's it.

In the end, I don't buy the idea that it's a sequel, because nothing is tied from the original to this new film. If it is really a sequel, then the writers should be flogged for writing a Part Two that hits all of the story beats of the first one nearly hit for hit.

If we're taking the modern cinema approach of being more scientifically sound, the characters might bother to actually make sure the brain scans are recording and review their findings after each death attempt. However, they do so after the very first flatline, but then abandon the whole idea of mapping the brain activities after death, making their whole career-risking endeavor pointless.

Skip this one, unless you really are after a case study on how to make a doomed-to-fail remake by taking some interesting source material, trying to update it to the modern day without understanding the original, and then strip out any heart from it, and then copy the story structure.

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