Flatliners (1990)

Director: Joel Schumacher
Starring: Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Kevin Bacon, William Baldwin, Oliver Platt

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I caught the full-screen version of Flatliners the other day on HBO. I really wish I'd watched the widescreen version. The shape of the screen isn't as important as the message in this film, however. Flatliners is a disturbingly apocalyptic film, and the apocalypse will arrive shrouded in blue light apparently. Here is a fascinating premise for a movie: med school students essentially kill and resuscitate each other in an effort to gain ultimate insight into life through brushes with death. Death, however, is about atonement for one's sins, and a return to life does not negate this fact. This film fit in neatly with my theme for the moment because of reading Philip K. Dick's final trilogy of novels that deal with religion in a modern context and, thus, death. What the characters in Flatliners hoped to find in death was the answer to life. What does it mean? Is there something more? Is there a God? While the film doesn't directly answer any of these big questions, it does deal with atonement of sins. More specifically, it deals with unconscious guilt and what might happen in death without atonement. It's a grim but fascinating picture. It must have been Schumacher's one good movie in that particular decade. That being said, it's a doozy of a movie. Thought-provoking (more so from what one can extrapolate from it than from what is is the picture itself) and entertaining, it's certainly worth a view.

August 4
apartment TV, early morning

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