Taglines: Some lines shouldn’t be crossed.
Flatliners movie storyline. Medical students begin to explore the realm of near death experiences, hoping for insights. Each has their heart stopped and is revived. They begin having flashes of walking nightmares from their childhood, reflecting sins they committed or had committed against them. The experiences continue to intensify, and they begin to be physically beaten by their visions as they try and go deeper into the death experience to find a cure.
Flatliners is a 1990 American science fiction psychological horror film directed by Joel Schumacher, produced by Michael Douglas and Rick Bieber, and written by Peter Filardi. It stars Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, William Baldwin, Oliver Platt, and Kevin Bacon. The film is about five medical students who attempt to find out what lies beyond death by conducting clandestine experiments that produce near-death experiences.
The film was shot on the campus of Loyola University (Chicago) between October 1989 and January 1990, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Sound Editing in 1990 (Charles L. Campbell and Richard C. Franklin). The film was theatrically released on August 10, 1990, by Columbia Pictures.
Film Review for Flatliners
One of the things you learn in medical school, it is said, is how to think like God. No one can teach you that, but unless you somehow learn it, you’ll never be comfortable looking people in the eye and telling them what their chances are. The characters in “Flatliners” are all medical students, and their egos are so healthy that during the course of the movie they engage in a competition to see who can look God himself in the eye.
Here’s their plan. It starts with those stories about people who are pronounced dead but then are brought back to life – and how a lot of them report the same blissful afterlife experience. They talk about a tunnel of light, peaceful music, and the presence of loved ones welcoming them to the other side. And they talk about being outside their own bodies, looking down, conscious of the efforts to revive them but feeling detached, because death is so sweet.
The young heroes of “Flatliners” want to visit that land of light and music, and return to tell the story. So they devise a dangerous experiment in which, one after another, they’ll deliberately create a condition of clinical death, sample the afterlife experience, and then be brought back to life by emergency measures. The audacity of this experiment is terrifying and intriguing, and let’s face it: It’s a great idea for a movie.
“Flatliners” was shot mostly in the neo-gothic gloom of turn of the century locations in and around the University of Chicago. Gargoyles and shadows and gloomy, stained-glass windows surround the deadly experiments, as the students, urged on by ringleader Kiefer Sutherland, tamper with God’s plans for them. One after another, they take what they hope is a round trip into eternity. The risks are many: Not only death, of course, but even expulsion from medical school.
What they find on the other side is not the proper business of a reviewer to reveal. How they come back, however, deserves some comment, because the movie engages in plot manipulation that is unworthy of the brilliance of its theme. Each student tries to one-up the others, to stay away a little longer, to go a little deeper into whatever is there. And so each resuscitation attempt is a little trickier.
Eventually the movie falls into a disappointing pattern, in which we’re supposed to hold our breath while yet another voyager balances between life and death. One resuscitation is suspenseful. Two are fine. More than two wears out their welcomes. The cast, talented young actors, inhabit the shadows with the right mixture of intensity, fear and cockiness.
In addition to Sutherland, there are Julia Roberts (her first role since “Pretty Woman”), Kevin Bacon, William Baldwin (Alec’s brother), Oliver Platt and Kimberly Scott. There were some hazards in this project – with the wrong note, they easily could look silly – and yet they take their chances and pull it off. “Flatliners” is an original, intelligent thriller, well-directed by Joel Schumacher. I only wish it had been restructured so we didn’t need to go through the same crisis so many times.
Flatliners (1990)
Directed by: Joel Schumacher
Starring: Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon, Julia Roberts, William Baldwin, Oliver Platt, Kimberly Scott, Joshua Rudoy, Benjamin Mouton, Hope Davis, Tressa Thomas
Screenplay by: Peter Filardi
Production Design by: Eugenio Zanetti
Cinematography by: Jan de Bont
Film Editing by: Robert Brown
Costume Design by: Susan Becker
Set Decoration by: Anne Kuljian
Art Direction by: Jim Dultz
Music by: James Newton Howard
Distributed by: Columbia Pictures
Release Date: August 10, 1990
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