Flatliners (2017)

Flatliners is the story of 5 medical students, who all take part in an experiment, to find out what happens to us in the afterlife, or if there is even such a thing. To do this, they take it in turns to stop their hearts for long enough to have their own experiences, but come back and tell their stories. However, this isn’t as simple as they might have imagined when their ‘sins’ come back with them and start wreaking havoc in their everyday lives. Resulting in serious complications for some of them. This idea to me was still quite refreshing, and the aspect of supernatural beings and life experiences being brought into this is what really hooked me in, well… and Ellen Page… and the 4% Rotten Tomatoes rating (oh and I love giving remakes a go).

As I mentioned, the cast was mostly what hooked me in with this remake, Ellen Page is a gem, and I was excited to see her in this because she takes on different characters and plays them well. This role for her, was no exception. You did understand the determination possessed by Page’s character from the beginning, and by the end you genuinely did fear for her, and in some parts empathise with what she was having to deal with as a consequence of her experiment. This hooked me when the film began. This part of the story was complimented wonderfully by Diego Luna’s character, who was concerned about what was going on because it was such a stupid thing to do, and frequently raised the incredibly real point that getting into a good medical school, and training to be a doctor is hard, don’t ruin all your hard work. Oh and, living is great, why are you all essentially committing suicide?

I don’t want to focus on the fact that this is a remake too much, so I don’t want to say the reason this film got bad is due to the choice of cast, the cast weren’t bad, it’s just the performances aren’t exactly memorable, but I guess this is possibly due to the writing. This was extremely poor in some areas, and I got a few eye-rolls in. The story was reasonably strong up until the point of shoving 2 new romances into an already busy film, it wasn’t needed, and took away some of the potential for originality. Similarly, the end is basically given away at the start. You are made aware of what is going to haunt Ellen Page’s character within the first 3 minutes, which again got a massive eye-roll.

There is really nothing much to say about it, and this seems to be the general consensus from those that have seen it. It was fine, it was well made from the point of view that it encorporated some comedy, some drama, it was a thriller, and possibly could be at a huge push a horror, and I would recommend that it is something you watch if you have either seen the original, and want to laugh at the attempt to make another average film from an already reasonably average film, or if you just want to see it, because it wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t great. I mean, I would watch it again, just maybe don’t get too excited about it.

5.5/10