Film Review: Flatliners
This story of medical students playing God to cross the boundaries of life and death is a cautionary tale of humans wanting to know too much of what lies beyond death. Peter Filardi’s clever screenplay takes us to a place where death represents a place in which we are able to atone for our sins. As personified by Kevin Bacon, Julia Roberts, Kiefer Sutherland, William Baldwin, and Oliver Platt, the medical students are a mixed breed in which each has their own reason for going through with the experiment.
Although all the character arcs build around each of them atoning for what they’ve done (or think they’ve done) to others, the film works because the underlining theme is that none of us should try to play God, not even doctors (who are so often accused of that very thing) and that we should live in the now rather than be consumed by the mistakes that me made in the past.
Director Joel Schumacher brings to the film an eeriness that he brought to THE LOST BOYS and that would carry over into his A TIME TO KILL, 8MM, and THE NUMBER 23. He has made films in just about every genre but it is in the suspense drama that he excels at and it shows here. Cinematography by Jan de Bont (who will later direct SPEED, THE HAUNTING remake, and LARA CROFT, TOMB RAIDER: THE CRADLE OF LIFE) and with original music by composer James Newton Howard the film is an unsettling look into the look into human nature.
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