Flatliners

Another of the movies that I had the chance to DVR during one of the free preview weekends was Flatliners. It's hard to believe this one is over 30 years old now, but it was released in 1990. At any rate, it's going to be on StarzEncore Suspense multiple times over the upcoming week, starting with overnight tonight at 1:54 AM and tomorrow at 12:58 PM, and several futher times; check your cable box if you've got the Encore package.

David Labraccio (Kevin Bacon) is a medical student who gets himself suspended from a Chicago medical school in a post-apocalyptic setting (the movie itself isn't post-apocalyptic, but for some reason the medical school buildings look like they'd fit right in with the set of 12 Monkeys) for performing emergency surgery when he's still just a medical student and not licensed to do this sort of work.

Among the non-suspended students is Nelson Wright (Kiefer Sutherland), who informs us at the beginning of the movie that today is a good day to die. Nelson, like a lot of people wonders if there's any sort of afterlife; indeed, one of his fellow students, Rachel Mannus (Julia Roberts) has been spending time with the patients on the verge of death. Nelson would like to find out if there is indeed an afterlife at all, and comes up with a daring plan that would probably have most people thinking he's at best an insane genius. He plans to have his body temperature lowered and then be injected with drugs that will simulate death for about a minute before (the "flatline" on the heart monitor giving its name to the movie) his heart is shocked back into motion.

But for this, he needs somebody to actually do all the work like re-warming his body, injecting him with the appropriate drugs at the right time, and the like. To that end, Nelson is able to recruite Rachel, Jue Hurley (William Baldwin), and Randy Steckle (Oliver Platt). David, having been suspended and having nothing to lose, joins in as well. Nelson is flatlined, and sees images from his past of the sort you might expect from the old chestnut about having one's life flash before one's eyes. But some of the images are disturbing, involving a bunch of young kids chasing another kid and tormenting him.

Nelson is successfully resuscitated, and decides that he doesn't really want to talk about what he experienced because of its traumatic nature. He obviously knows the children in question that he saw. He was one of them, and it wasn't the one being tormented. Thanks take an even darker turn when he starts having hallucinations about what he saw while he was flatlining. Or was this stuff actually real.

Each of Nelson's friends decides that they too want to undergo the experience he did, but each of them also has demons in their past that are going to come back to haunt them in the present after they flatline. Joe has been videotaping his sexual conquests, and he has a lot of them even though he's engaged to another woman. After he flatlines, he starts seeing those other women on TV screens wherever he goes. Rachel's father was a veteran who served in the Vietnam War, only to suffer from PTSD and ultimately shoot himself when Rachel was just a little girl. David, like Nelson, bullied a little girl, and starts seeing that little girl in his hallucinations.

Meanwhile, Nelson's hallucinations are getting worse, as the kid he tormented all those years ago shows up and starts committing violence against Nelson that manifests itself in real life. David, meanwhile, has a flash of inspiration of how to deal with his hallucinations, but will the other students be able to follow his lead? And will it kill them if they try?

Flatliners is a movie that I found very intriguing, albeit also one that's not without its share of problems. We've all done things that pretty much any organized religion would consider a sin, and the idea that those are the things that would show up first in an afterlife is interesting. The contrast between the afterlife and the hallucinations on one hand and the present day is fairly stylishly executed.

But Flatliners also has a lot of plot holes that may be too distracting to some viewers. The idea of anybody other than the already suspended David following Nelson requires some suspension of disbelief, but even more than that is the fact that the students would have to use too much of the school's medical equipment and drugs not to be noticed by the administration.

All in all, Flatliners is definitely thought-provoking and, despite its flaws, absolutely worth a watch.