Twenty-seven years after the original, Flatliners is back from the…
[dies]
[gets brought back to life]
Sorry. I’m legally required to make one “back from the dead” pun when discussing Flatliners. Anyway, the 1990 original is getting a 2017 remake, because that’s how these things work now, starring Ellen Page, Diego Luna, Nina Dobrev, James Norton, and Kiersey Clemons. Kiefer Sutherland is also back, although this time without Julia Roberts. In case you’re unfamiliar with Dave Stewart and the Spiritual Cowboys and have no idea what Flatliners is about: a team of medical students stop their hearts for increasingly lengthy periods of time to have near-death experiences in the afterlife. “But as their experiments become increasingly dangerous,” according to the official plot synopsis, “they are each haunted by the sins of their pasts, brought on by the paranormal consequences of trespassing to the other side.”
According to Sutherland, there’s a direct connection between the 2017 Flatliners and the 1990 Flatliners (what a weird sentence). “I play a professor at the medical university,” he explained. “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.” There’s always a chance “Nelson Wright” has never left Sutherland, and he’s been playing the doctor since 1990. That would put a new spin on 24.
Flatliners — which is directed by Niels Arden Oplev (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and written by Ben Ripley (Source Code) — opens on September 29.
