I was surprised to see a trailer for director Niels Arden Oplev's remake of the 1990 Joel Schumacher film FLATLINERS arrive online today, but I probably shouldn't have been, given that the film's release is just three months away. Honestly, I forgot the movie was coming out this fall.
Scripted by Peter Filardi, the original FLATLINERS told the following story:
At University Hospital School of Medicine, a group of ambitious medical students are about to die… and live to describe the experience.
Embarking on a daring and arrogant experiment, the five aim to push through the confines of life and touch the face of death. In their search for knowledge, however, the five discover the chilling consequences of daring to tamper with immortality.
Written by SOURCE CODE's Ben Ripley, this remake (actually, those involved with the making of it seem to prefer the term "reimagining") stars Ellen Page, Diego Luna, Kiersey Clemons, Nina Dobrev, and James Norton as a new group of ambitious medical students who conduct that same dangerous experiment. That group is joined in the cast by Beau Mirchoff, Charlotte McKinney, and Kiefer Sutherland, who played one of the flatliner kids in the 1990 film and is a professor at the medical university in this one.
Sutherland said that he would be playing the same character in this "reimagining", the guy had just changed his name between films. Dobrev disagrees, saying Sutherland's characters are two different people.
The trailer, which can be seen below, definitely comes off like a straightforward remake, with no indication that the students are copying an experiment conducted nearly thirty years ago. They certainly don't expect the supernatural side effects.
We have both the domestic and international trailers here, but the only difference I noticed was that the text in one says the movie is coming "This September" while the other says "This Year".
The new FLATLINERS will be released in the U.S. on September 29, 2017.