Flatliners (2017)
Five medical students, obsessed by what lies beyond
the confines of life, embark on a daring experiment: by stopping their
hearts for short periods, each triggers a near-death experience - giving
them a firsthand account of the afterlife.
Director:
Niels Arden OplevStars:
Medical students begin to explore the realm of near death experiences,
hoping for insights. Each has their heart stopped and is revived. They
begin having flashes of walking nightmares from their childhood,
reflecting sins they committed or had committed against them. The
experiences continue to intensify, and they begin to be physically
beaten by their visions as they try and go deeper into the death
experience to find a cure.
Country:
USALanguage:
EnglishRelease Date:
29 September 2017 (USA) See more »Also Known As:
Além da Morte See more »Box Office
Budget:
$20,000,000 (estimated)
See more »
Company Credits
Technical Specs
Runtime:
Color:
ColorDid You Know?
Trivia
Ellen Page also voiced and motion captured the lead character Jodie Holmes from the 2013 video game Beyond: Two Souls (2013). The game explores the "infraworld" which is analogous to the world after death where the souls reside. Ellen Page's character in the game also experiences supernatural activities and communicates with entities from the "other side."
Deep in the bowels of a university's medical school, a group of
students intentionally kill themselves for minutes at a time to
experience what lies beyond. This is a fabulous idea for a movie, but
unfortunately "Flatliners" represents the second failed attempt to do it
justice. It's not a terrible film, and neither was the original.
They're both frustratingly not terrible: the cast acts the hell out of
every moment, struggling to find profundity in situations that are
conceived in the most superficial way, often settling for cheap horror
movie jolts and "it was only a dream" false alarms, and things wrap up
so neatly that the sense of wonder and terror inherent in the story
remains largely untapped.
Joel Schumacher's 1990 original was a surprise hit, starring a cast of soon-to-be-huge stars, including Julia Roberts and Kiefer Sutherland,
who has a supporting role here; but its premise, which could have
opened the door to a visionary work of sci-fi horror, settled into a
sort of gothic self-help drama groove, with the medical students
realizing that the seemingly supernatural goings-on triggered by their
experiments in "flatlining" were manifestations of their past
misdeeds. Director Niels Arden Oplev’s remake, adapted by Ben Ripley
from Peter Filardi's original script, sticks to that template, changing
key details here and there while embracing a style that stirs every
current horror movie visual cliche into a jagged paste.
But then
(ominous bass fiddles!) mysterious things start to happen. Courtney is
visited by an apparition that's obviously connected to her feelings of
guilt over her sister's death. In short order, Jamie, Marlo and Sophia
all begin experiencing creepy events and disturbing visions. By the time
the movie reaches its midpoint, there's no question of where the film
has to go before the credits roll.
Fully 20 percent of the
movie's running time consists of characters wandering along through dark
apartments, basements and corridors, wondering if the noises they
hear are just their imaginations while out-of-focus shapes and faces
dart through the negative space nearby. Sometimes these shocks
are amplified by a shriek of atonal soundtrack music, and once in a
while you'll get a jolt of graphic violence that rarely has any
long-term consequences. The whole thing is too much of a tease, and once
you figure that out, there's no actual suspense to speak of, just
momentary manipulations.
The cast gives the movie everything they've got. Luna and Page in
particular make much stronger impressions than you might expect, given
the repetitious and mostly shallow scenarios they're asked to enact, and
there are a couple of moments near the end where Sophia's story snaps
into focus and finds just the right balance between
inspirational melodrama and horror that otherwise eludes the movie. But
the choppy, cliched visuals and the script's superficial approach to the
characters' predicaments (people are constantly stating the obvious to
each other, and to the audience) ultimately undo any goodwill that the
actors can generate.
This sort of movie can be more frustrating
than a maliciously terrible or blunderingly incompetent film because at
each step you can tell that everyone involved in the production
sincerely believed in the material, both as raucous entertainment and as
a tale of moral growth. But when the best you can say about a movie is
that it means well, that's proof that it's not working on any level that
matters.
FINAL RATING: 4/10 for the genre and 3/10 overall. I expected a lot from this movie. I love the original from 1990 but this remake fulfills all the stereotypes, it is more worth than the original. So sad.
Thanks for reading and have fun watching movies.
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