Look at this. I do one remake movie before I do the original and suddenly I'm doing it all the time. Everything out of order, backwards, inside-out, sideways... What have I become? Regardless, I'd better get this review of Flatliners done before my OCD explodes my brain through the medium of cringing at the out-of-order nature of things.
Courtney is a medical student with a little extra-curricular project: she wants to die... and then be brought back, so she can map the brain during the time that she's clinically dead to see if there is any evidence of activity in the brain during that time. She enlists the help of several of her fellow medical students in this task - Jamie, Marlo, Ray and Sophia, and together they manage both to "kill" Courtney and bring her back. Much to everyone's surprise, after her near-death experience Courtney seems to have a new perspective on life, and her memory has improved to the point where she can recall the most obscure of details and even play the piano after not touching it for twelve years. Seeing this, her friends all want to gain this "advantage" as well and so they each undergo the same process and have their own near-death experiences. At first, everything seems good; soon, however, they also start to experience negative and even threatening hallucinations, all centred around incidents from their past. Did their experiments with death and NDEs somehow bring something back from the other side, and what can they do to stop it before their lives are in real danger?
Uggggghhhh. I really wasn't looking forward to doing this review, because it's nigh-on impossible to come up with anything interesting to say about this remake of Flatliners. Good movies are fine; plenty of things to say about them. And even most bad films can at least be made into some degree of entertainment value, as I can just snark my way through the review as a form of therapy. But this movie? The best I can say about it is that it's like an after-school special about the importance of facing up to your past mistakes and taking responsibility for your actions, in the most insipid way possible. When I was watching the film at the cinema, I wasn't actually falling asleep, but I think I came close a few times.
The characters are bland and interchangeable - for example, each of the three girls wears the exact same sports crop top/bra when they're "flatlining". They're also given little to no backstory whatsoever, despite the importance of past events coming back to haunt them - Jamie's entire characterisation, for example, is that he's rich, lives on a boat and sleeps with lots of girls. And that's a lot of backstory compared to, say, Ray, whose entire characterisation is that, before he came to medical school, he was an intelligence officer for the Rebel Alliance a firefighter. There are absolutely no hooks to draw us into these characters' lives, to make us interested in them, which in itself is a kiss of death for a movie because if you can't engage your audience then you're not going to get favourable reviews.
And the scares of the film? The idea that they had brought something back with them when they were having fun being dead? Well, most of the halfway decent parts of that are spoiled in the trailer, which I suppose is a good thing as now you can just watch that and save yourselves the bother of seeing the whole movie. The resolution to that is even worse - like an after-school special, as I mentioned above. And even then the film manages to cock things up. One character goes to find the person whose life they ruined as a teenager to apologise, which is alright, but then whines, "Please, I need you to forgive me." Even at this point she can't help but make it all about her, making herself even less likeable (which is a shame, as she's quite cute).
It's unrealistic in every way, and I don't mean just the stupid "kill me then bring me back" plan that starts all this off. At one point it's considered "amazing" that one character can suddenly sit down at a piano and play a piece she's not played in 12 years as if her NDE "unlocked" that part of her brain. I haven't played piano in over 20 years, and I could still sit down at one and start playing my Grade 2 City and Guilds piece (Burgmuller's l'Arabesque, in case you're curious) after only a few minutes to reacquaint myself with the keys. It's muscle memory, not a miracle. Even the Kiefer Sutherland cameo is wasted, as they give him a completely different name and remove all the parts that connect him with the 1990 film so they apparently didn't confuse the audience. I just spent all his screen time staring at him and thinking, "That's never his real hair."
This movie is a boring waste of your time and brainpower.
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