‘Flatliners’ Comes Back from the Dead

Hollywood’s remake train keeps chugging, but the news isn’t all bad. Niels Arden Oplev will direct a reboot of the 1990 thriller ‘Flatliners‘, which originally starred Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Kevin Bacon, Oliver Platt and Billy Baldwin. You might know Oplev’s name as the director of the original 2009 version of ‘The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo‘. That already gives the project more legitimacy than you might expect.

Oplev is a very busy guy right now. His first American movie ‘Dead Man Down’, starring Colin Farrell, is about to premiere, and he just finished the pilot episode for a CBS series based on Stephen King’s ‘Under the Dome’. I expect big things from this director.

If you need a refresher course, the 1990 ‘Flatliners’ focused on a group of medical students who create near death experiences in order to see if there’s anything in the great beyond, and find themselves visited by physical manifestations of sins they’ve committed.

The original film was directed by Joel Schumacher, who in my opinion has made only one great film: ‘The Lost Boys‘. Ben Ripley, screenwriter of ‘Source Code‘, has been hired to pen the script for the remake.

I think that this has potential. The original movie had a great cast, so I’m curious to see who will star in the remake. I enjoyed the original quite a bit, and I have faith that Oplev will do it justice. It’s going to be tough to fill the shoes of the original actors, though.

Who’s to say that this film shouldn’t be remade in this day and age, where just about anything gets the reboot treatment. I think with today’s technology and some fresh faces, this can actually be decent, if not better than the original. What do you think? Would you go see a remake of ‘Flatliners’?

1 comment

  1. William Henley

    I wasn’t really a big fan of the original – not saying it was bad, just not my style. A remake to me would be on par with a SyFy movie-of-the-week. I just don’t see it working.I expect it to be a box-office bomb.

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