BEFORE: I know, this seems more like a horror film than a back-to-school film, but if it's anything like the original, it's set in a medical school, so that counts as a college, right? For me it's maybe right on the edge between a horror film and a school-based film, only it doesn't link up with anything else in my list of horror films for October, so I'm going to follow the linking and put this one here, think of it as an advance look at horror films - the main horror chain will still kick off on October 1 as usual.
Ellen Page carries over from "Whip It".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Flatliners" (1990) (Movie #2,172)
THE PLOT: Five medical students, obsessed with what lies beyond the confines of life, embark on a daring experiment: by stopping their hearts for short periods, each triggers a near-death experience, giving them a firsthand account of the afterlife.
AFTER: The crazy kids these days, I gotta tell ya - if they're not doing internet dares or skating around in the roller derbies, they're stopping each others hearts so they can determine if there's life after death. I guess my generation was so messed up, with the 80's music and the cross-dressing and the wine coolers, the next bunch of teens had to go pretty far to get their kicks, or get some attention. Oh, please, Mom & Dad, pay attention to ME, I almost died at medical school, testing out a theory! OK, so maybe "flatlining" isn't really a hot trend on college campuses these days, but since planking used to be a thing, and then parkour (sorry, "free-running"...) who knows what's going to catch on with the college crowd? And remember the "mannequin challenge", how stupid was THAT?
After getting people to stand perfectly still in a room while it's being filmed, an act that has no practical purpose or function at all, perhaps assisted temporary suicide is the next logical step. Because when you're dead, you really can stand very still. Or plank, or take the ice-bucket challenge - all formerly trendy things suddenly become possible. Of course, this is done temporarily here, to monitor the brain activity after death. Supposedly no one has ever thought to do this before, which I find very hard to believe - surely there must have been some terminally ill patient somewhere that some doctor thought to do an experimental MRI on at the moment of death? Anyway, that's the experiment here, but what's probably more interesting are the hallucinations that these students have while dead, which seem to follow them back into the living world after they're revived.
Let's be clear here, if there is brain activity after one's heart stops functioning, that would explain a lot. We're already familiar with the reverse, where a body keeps living after a person is "brain-dead", so why can't there also be "heart-dead", with the brain continuing to function for a short time. I don't know, two minutes, three? Five tops, right? If there are synapses still firing during that time, a person's brain could stimulate the optic nerve, which would explain that "white light" phenomenon that people associate with crossing over.
And we're all familiar with dreams, which result when our brains are still active but our bodies are at rest, as our brain sorts through the experiences of the day, or long-past memories, and scrambles them together into a loose narrative. If I have that dream that I'm back in high-school, and I feel pressure because there's a big test that day and I forgot to study, it's probably connected to something that happened at work that day where I was unprepared for something, and my brain related it to a previous situation where I had that same feeling. I don't wake up and think that I really went back to high school, I know that it was just a dream.
But maybe something similar happens when we die - for a short time we're still conscious in a dream-like state, and before our brain shuts down it cycles through some random memories while it still can, so we might see locations or people from our past that are important to us. When some people have temporarily "died" and come back, they might confuse this with being in heaven (which might have looked suspiciously like their parents house) and seeing their dead relatives again. So how come we can't just call this near-death experience what it is, a dream similar to the ones we have on a regular night? What about people who are in comas, are they dreaming or are they glimpsing the afterlife? My money's on the former.
This movie falls JUST short of suggesting that when these students have these temporary post-death experiences, what they see there is based on their own self-image, how they feel about past events that might still be bothering them overtakes the dream-state and contorts it. The four people who undergo the experiment are all guilty about something in their pasts, for one it's a young sister who died in a car accident, for another it's the girlfriend that he convinced to have an abortion, for a third it's a girl that she cyber-bullied in high school, and the fourth feels responsible for the recent death of a patient. Feeling that guilt at the moment of entering their dream-states, of course that's going to affect things - just as it would in a dream. Considering these are all medical students, it's kind of a wonder that their "afterlives" didn't consist of running from a pack of angry student loan collectors.
But maybe in that moment when we die, if there's something that's bothering us, making us feel guilty, it could create an illusion, as the brain is perhaps working things out for the final time, that could be equivalent to a final judgment, where we'd each have to decide if we felt we were a good person or a bad person, based on the number of concerns we still have at that time. If we don't have any grudges or guilt, if we wrapped things up in our life fairly well, maybe we can be at peace and allow ourselves to feel calm and blissful in those last moments. If we feel, deep down, that we've taken more than we've given, if we didn't deserve what we ended up with, some form of self-torture kicks in, and we imagine ourselves going to some form of hell, albeit an imaginary one.
Of course, nobody really understands the human brain and what it's capable of - or what influence the Christian models of heaven and hell have on us when we die. Perhaps it all becomes some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, since we've been led to BELIEVE that certain things happen when we die, our brain in its last moments might create a dream-type scenario that's based on what we've been told. But this is all just conjecture, and honestly, I'm in no hurry to have my suspicions confirmed.
In the short term, the four students who undergo the heart-stopping experiments feel really good, they've got a new energy, they're sharper at work, they find that they can party longer, enjoy sex more and I'm guessing food tastes better too. There's nothing like almost dying to make you feel more alive, right? Who cares about a few minor hallucinations when you're suddenly at the top of your game?
Of course, you can take things the other way and say that there was some kind of malevolent presence that followed these crazy kids back from the Great Beyond. This is left fairly ambiguous, since we're seeing through their eyes and ears, there are enough of those "Look out, the thing is RIGHT BEHIND YOU!" moments ago to maybe make you wonder. Having experienced auditory hallucinations myself earlier this year when I had the flu, I think you know which interpretation I favor. Still, I got startled a few times here.
A couple of NITPICK POINTS, though - why would a medical school build a second, identical hospital ward in the basement, underneath the real one, and then NEVER use it? Did they have to spend all that tuition money before the end of the fiscal year? Or is this where they keep the back-up MRI machine in case something goes wrong with the primary one? Of course, they needed to explain how these students could use medical equipment without anyone finding out, but the explanation makes no sense. An inactive hospital ward serves no purpose, not for training students or for treating sick people - and if it's inactive, why does the staff still clean it every night?
NITPICK POINT #2: Don't any students live in the dorms any more? Here one student lives with her mother, but the others live with no roommates in semi-luxurious apartments, which doesn't make sense for struggling med students. Then again, this is set in Toronto, so maybe the medical colleges are different up there. OK, but one guy lives on a BOAT, and that's just crazy. How the hell does he afford the docking fees if he's only eating ramen soup and Molson?
NITPICK POINT #3: I didn't get the scene where the first girl flatlined, and as she was coming back, the room seemed to explode. WTF? I thought that since they'd warned each other about wearing any metal around the MRI, maybe the last guy to arrive didn't get the warning, and accidentally forgot to take his watch off, and this exploded the machine. But seconds later, the machine seems to be fine, so was this just another hallucination? It's unclear.
It's also unclear whether this is a sequel to the original "Flatliners" or a remake, a case could be made for either one, since there is one actor from the original who appears here as an established doctor, BUT his character has a different name than before. So if you want to think of this as a remake, then it's not the same character, but if you vote for a sequel, then maybe he changed his name and moved up to Canada to start his life over. Your call.
Also starring Diego Luna (last seen in "Casa de mi Padre"), Nina Dobrev (last seen in "xXx: Return of Xander Cage"), James Norton (last seen in "Rush"), Kiersey Clemons (last seen in "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising"), Kiefer Sutherland (last seen in "Forsaken"), Beau Mirchoff (last seen in "I Am Number Four"), Madison Brydges, Miguel Anthony, Jenny Raven, Charlotte McKinney, Jacob Soley, Anna Arden, Wendy Raquel Robinson
RATING: 5 out of 10 chest compressions
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