Flatliners (1990) was one of those titles that sadly seem to be forgotten by the big audience, although it was a personal favorite of mine. Well, Hollywood never forgets (or at least it has very selective memory) and it’s follow-up is already in the status of post-production. With an homonymous title, Flatliners (2017) tells the story of a group of medical students who are running an experiment to reach their near death experiences. The eternal questions of “is there an afterlife?”, “do we really see the light at the end of the tunnel?” and “what is in that light?”. The same motives that moved the characters in the first movie Flatliners (1990), but with newer faces and higher technology.
One of the bigger hits of the original Flatliners (1990) was how director Joel Schumacher managed to build the good dark mystery thriller around a group of young and quite unknown actors back then. Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon, Julia Roberts and William Baldwin were the naive students who tried to bend the moral laws of medicine and played God. This time, the young students are played by Nina Dobrev, Ellen Page, Diego Luna and Kiersey Clemons, only Kiefer Sutherland reprising his original role.
One of the most exciting facts for this movie is the choice of Danish Niels Arden Oplev as the director. He was responsible for the original Swedish version for Stieg Larsson‘s best-seller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009), from the Millenium series. He was also responsible for the simple but effective action thriller Dead Man Down (2013). In both titles, he has shown a great domain of tension and dark cinematography, which will be a key factor for a movie like Flatliners (2017). In addition to that, the script is written by Ben Ripley, one of the most interesting names in modern science fiction films for being the writer of Source Code (2011) and its announced sequel.
Flatliners (2017) is scheduled to come out this fall around the world. Hopefully, it can also be premiered at some film festival along the summer, which I think could be a good way for a presentation of a movie like this. And as a appetizer, Sony Pictures released the first official trailer for the film 24 hours ago, which you can watch here:
