Flatliners takes five American medical students one of which wants to see what lies beyond death and then live to tell the tale.
When Nelson achieves his task, three of the remaining four also begin to get ideas above their station. However, as
if bringing someone back from the dead wasn't enough to bring about tension, old feelings and experiences are
reawakened and one by one the students are forced to confront their demons from the past.
Kiefer Sutherland plays Nelson, the first to go under, a man with a clear sense of direction to begin with, even if
he has doubts later on. There's very few films in which I can easily watch Julia Roberts, this being one with
My Best Friend's Wedding,
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and
Notting Hill being the others,
but here she, William Baldwin and Kevin Bacon each have their doubts about effectively killing themselves,
but their curiosity gets the better of them.
Oliver Platt, most recently seen in
2012,
stays wise to the facts by opting not to find fame the easy way and chronicles the events into his dictaphone.
In fact, he makes one of my favourite quotes early on when he expresses disgust at Nelson wanting to 'kill himself',
"I did not come to medical school to murder my classmates, no matter how deranged they might be".
Flatliners is one of the few films that I fell in love with the first time I saw it - and it's still a corker 20 years on,
even if it hasn't got the most coherent of plots. After seeing the film in the cinema, the haunting score by James Newton
Howard over the end credits kept me hankering for a soundtrack CD, but just my luck that a rare thing occurred - a
film without such a CD to accompany its release, even in America and I know as I made several enquiries.
Things went from bad to worse in early 1991 as the retail video release approached and I crossed my fingers that
the unwatchable fullscreen version would be accompanied by a widescreen version, but to no avail, even later when a
PAL Laserdisc was announced since when Joel Schumacher shoots a film in 2.35:1, there's no compromise possible when
it comes to constructing a pan-and-scan image.
By the way, although the above retail prices are given for this title, you can get the Blu-ray from Amazon for under
eight quid and the DVD is about half that.
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