#full disclosure i think that by the end kiefer was looking SO sexy in that movie so if you're like

[moviegroovies]

you know, i saw flatliners (2017) when it came out, but i never got around to watching the original until tonight. now that i HAVE seen it, i think i can safely say that the original was really good! it also, unfortunately, made me like the remake a little less than i did before.

i’ve been on a kiefer sutherland kick, if you can’t tell from all the fuckin’ lost boys posts. in that movie, and in a pretty big chunk of his earlier roles, sutherland plays an aggressive gang-member type, the express antagonist for the film. flatliners was a departure from that for him... but not that much of one. 

the thing about kiefer sutherland is that i’ve yet to watch a movie where his character isn’t loud and aggressive at some point. even young guns, which has him play the softest & most affable of the guys in the gang, has some uncomfortable scenes where he’s just altogether frightening toward a girl with some obvious trauma, made worse by the fact that she’s ostensibly his love interest. i’m not here to pass judgement on how that translates to kiefer’s behavior in real life; it’s just something i’ve noticed. well, in flatliners, that trend wasn’t exactly kicked to the curb. his character in this movie is nice enough, an ambitious doctor with a calling to break the next great barrier of our time, and also... kind of a terrible person. 

i’ve never been one for the “ambition is evil” trope, but this movie definitely plays with it. kiefer’s character nelson isn’t evil, not really, but he has a troubled past that is revealed as the movie goes on: apparently, at age 9, nelson’s bullying of another boy from his neighborhood saw him responsible for the child’s accidental death, as well as the crippling of his own dog. nelson was taken away from his family for this, and, though he says he thought the punishment he suffered after the fact had been atonement enough for what he did, it’s clear that there was an element of guilt attached to the act that never left him alone. in fact, the common thread that binds together the four main characters who flatline over the course of the film is that guilt--one way or another, each of them has done something they have to carry with them, and when they “die,” they come back unable to repress or excuse these things like they were once able to. aside from nelson’s manslaughter, the film also deals with joe (william baldwin) filming his sexual encounters with women without their consent, rachel’s (julia roberts) feelings of culpability in her father’s suicide, and david’s (kevin bacon) history of bullying a black girl who went to grade school with him. 

the way that the remake treats the guilt/“crimes” each of its protagonists are carrying with them is the major point on which it departs from the original. in the original, two of the characters, david and rachel, deal with pain relating to people in their lives who are dead--whether they are actually culpable (as david is) or not (like rachel). additionally, joe’s guilt, while it does involve people who are still alive, deals with something that, for most of the film, only he knows about--how can you atone for something that no one holds you accountable for? the only one of the characters in the remake dealing with a similar guilt is ellen page’s character courtney, who feels responsible for the death of her sister in a car crash. the thing is (spoiler!), ellen page’s character is also the only character who dies.

now, i’m going to be upfront with the fact that it’s been a while since i watched the new flatliners, and unlike the original, i’ve only seen it once, so the details are fuzzy. if i get something wrong in my recollection, please be gentle and ascribe the error to human imperfection, lol. 

that being said, i feel like the remake fundamentally misunderstood what made the original a great film, trying to remake it in a genre it was never meant to occupy, and as a result, it turned what should have been a suspenseful, thought-provoking story of error and redemption into... just another cookie-cutter horror movie with a nostalgic name. the ways the two movies deal with the guilt their characters face are fundamentally opposed; in the original, only one of the four characters who flatline face the person they wronged physically and apologizes. david, yes, goes to winnie hicks and tells her he was wrong for doing what he did to her in their youth, and when she accepts his apology and sees that he’s genuinely a changed person, he gets a moment of catharsis that’s similar to the one that seemed to be repeated in different forms throughout the remake. however, joe, nelson, and rachel have no such opportunity. in the remake, neither does courtney... and courtney dies. 

that’s the difference that bugs me. never mind the way that the remake changed the nature of flatlining itself (as far as i can remember, unlike the 1990 flatliners, the 2017 version has actual demons/monsters/creatures/ghosts/whatever follow the protagonists out of their trip, which always felt like a strange turn from what started as a psuedo-scientific film, and seems even stranger when you compare it to the scene in the original where david finds nelson struggling against himself in the van, implying that the manifestation of billy mahoney that we and nelson had encountered was, in fact, a product of nelson’s guilty conscience), the thing that really fucking gets me is that the remake gives its characters one way to make amends: apologize to the person you wronged, and if you can’t, then you die. 

honestly, the nuance the original showed, the way that joe couldn’t ever really fix what he did to those girls, the way that nelson didn’t easily give himself over to regret, even mocking billy mahoney at his grave (“wake up, you little shit, you’ve got company!”), the way that rachel had no real reason to feel guilt for her father’s death except for the fact that it’s easy for a child to take the blame for something that’s out of their hands; all of that was what made the film good for me, and all of that is what i think the makers of the remake sort of missed. a 2017 reimagining of flatliners could have been really incredible; i’ve seen many posts praising the inclusivity of the cast (and yeah, after the original’s sausage party with one token female and no people of color whatsoever, the cast of the remake is a breath of fresh air), and i think that advances in science in the 27 years between the two films could have made the psuedoscience the original thrived on a little more believable. however, when it came down to the heart of the thing, the same understanding of them human psyche just wasn’t there--and honestly, i don’t think it was ever supposed to be.

in comparison, flatliners 2017 just felt cheap.

that’s just my two cents in hindsight, though. i think, coming out of the theater, i really did like the film... it just didn’t hold up the way i feel flatliners 1990 has.

i don’t want to end on a bitchy note, so let me just say a few more things i admired about the original while i’m pouring my heart out. basically: i loved julia roberts’ hair and general Look in this film, i liked the subplot with david the atheist reaching a point where he rallied against god for nelson’s life at the end, and i really enjoyed nelson’s entire plotline, the way he teetered on the edge of batshit crazy without ever quite taking the plunge. from the beginning nelson is set up as an ambitious genius, a real victor frankenstein type, and his pride definitely gets the better of him multiple times throughout the film. despite being a promising student in their medical school, nelson is never very professional in the resuscitation when anyone else is flatlining; he pounds joe’s chest when he doesn’t immediately respond to the cpr, he goes on a little bit of a power trip and plays with david’s life, and he very nearly injects rachel with a fatal dose when the defibrillators short circuit. additionally, when rachel insists on getting a try at flatlining and is backed by the rest of nelson’s handpicked team, he accuses them all of being tourists riding his coattails. he’s kind of messy, and never exactly nice. it fucking ASTOUNDED me that he got to live at the end of the movie, but honestly, i’m really glad he did. as we got to know more about him, it was clear to me that nelson was generally a person with his heart in the right place, acting out of residual trauma and a pretty obvious dose of jealousy. there were always signs that he wasn’t all bad, though: he let the others take over with joe when his way wasn’t working, he listened to steckle and david and refrained from injecting rachel with the stuff he was certain would save her, and by the end, his remorse for his act which killed billy was so genuine that he was willing to kill himself to make amends. in general, i think that nelson was clearly a more troubled and gray-moraled person than page’s courtney, but he was a character in a movie with more forgiveness for wrongs done, and the end product was kind of fantastic.

anyway, fuck all of this. must a movie be good? is it not enough to see kiefer sutherland, unhinged?