Okay, so I finally found some remakes to review (thanks mom) since I went off script last time.
Flatlines (1990) follows five medical students as they try to find out what happens after death. One by one, they all stop their heart for about five minutes and then are brought back to life all in the name of science.
The mastermind of this plan is Nelson Wright who is the first to flatline. After being brought back, all is normal for a few hours until one day when Nelson is walking home and he sees a little boy running into an abandoned warehouse. Worried, Nelson runs after the boy and trie to make sure that he is ok. When the boy turns around, Nelson realizes that this boy is someone he knows from his past named Billy Mahoney who he used to bully and accidentally killed and the kid beats the hell out of him. Instead of telling anyone, Nelson keeps this to himself and continues his experiment with his classmates despite him being constantly tortured by this kid.
The next to flatline is Joe Hurley and just like Nelson, he starts to have hallucinations. Joe is known to get with a lot of women but what these women don’t know is that he records them without their knowledge. This is incorporated into his hallucinations and he begins to see his tapes on every tv he passes and he even hallucinates girls trying to get with him.
The next person to flatline is David Labraccio who, at first, si very skeptical that their experiment was doing anything. After he comes back, he begins to hallucinate a small back girl whom he used to bully as a child. She follows him, screaming obscenities at him his whole way home.
The next and final person to flatline is Rachel Manus, Davids’s girlfriend. She hallucinates her dead father who she believes she killed by accident. The only person who does not go under is Randy Steckle After everyone’s hallucinations start to interfere with their real lives like Nelson being physically harmed and Joe’s fiance leaving him, Nelson finally breaks the news to the others about his hallucinations, and the others also connect the dots that their hallucinations have to do with their experiment.
In order to break free from this nightmare that they are all living, each person who flatlines has to come to terms with what has happened to them or what they did to others in the past and move on. David visits the girl he used to bully and apologizes, Rachel finally accepts that her father’s death was not her fault, and Joe loses his fiance which helps put his wrongdoings into perspective. The only person still having a hard time is Nelson who can’t come to terms with what he has done and move on. He decided the only way to get rid of this torturous little boy is to flatline again. n the real world, everyone is trying to bring him back to life but nothing working. While he’s “dead” he is tortured and killed the same way that he tortured and killed Billy. After this, Nelson finally has the peace of mind to move past Billy’s death and his nightmare also stops.
Flatliners 2017 is just as good as the original with a special appearance from Nelson as this one set of medical students professor. Just like the original this movie explains that 1) we should NOT play with death for our own gain and 2) that the sins of our past stick with us, even when we think we’re over it. We must confront it head-on in order to really be at peace. This is one of the movie remakes that I actually enjoyed. I actually might have enjoyed this new version more than the original. The characters seem more real and the story is more engaging. I actually almost cried a few times when they revealed the nightmares that these characters had like when Courtney died and when Jamie found out that his baby was alive.