Flatliners (2017)

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Flatliners (2017)
2017 USA Directed by Niels Arden Oplev
UK cinema release print.

Warning: One mild spoiler in here.

Well, my first reaction to hearing that there was a remake of Flatliners was... why?

The original 1990 movie starring Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts and Kevin Bacon was a bit of a classic for my generation... although I honestly can’t remember too much about it now (might have to pick up a Blu Ray at some point so I can rewatch and review it here). I know I was fairly passionate about it, like a lot of people I knew and... I think I went to see it about three times at the cinema on its initial release. That being said, after one more watch a few years later on VHS (the cinema to home video release delay in those days was somewhere between 3-5 years... youngsters don’t  realise how lucky they are right now) I kind of forgot about it until, pretty much, I heard the news of the remake/reboot/sequel. And even after seeing it I’m still not quite sure which of those it is... pick one.

I wasn’t rushing out to see this but I did quite like the trailer for the new one and I always quite enjoy Ellen Page as an actress so... I thought I might as well give it a go. I’ve got nothing much against remakes... after all, some of the, arguably,  best versions of films are remakes (such as the Humphrey Bogart remake of The Maltese Falcon or the Charlton Heston remake of Ben Hur - reviewed here). I decided to go and enjoy it for what it was and not be too judgemental. I wasn’t sure how different it could be, though, being as the plot on the trailer looked like it was following the original movie fairly closely, aside from character names and a more equal mix of male and female characters.

It has to be said that this new version of Flatliners is actually pretty good although, to be honest, there really isn’t a heck of a lot that’s been changed from the original story. It’s still about a bunch of med students, one of whom craves to see what happens on ‘the other side’ in the afterlife. In this case, it’s Ellen Page’s character Courtney who instigates things, pulling together a small team to help her chart her brain while she’s ‘flatlining’ and making sure someone qualified enough is there to restart her heart after she’s been dead for a minute. In this case the character is motivated by guilt over something that’s happened to her in her past and she wants to see someone again.

Like the original film, once she’s flatlined and walked about in an eerily shot dream world, the majority of the others want to have a go too... especially when they see Courtney’s brain power increase to enable her to do way more than you would imagine she could in such a short space of time. However, like the original, their journeys into another realm within themselves starts to bring ‘anomolies’ to  haunt their waking hours and try to kill them unless a certain set of conditions relating to shady secrets from their past are fulfilled. From then on the film becomes more of a horror film for the remainder of the time... or at least as much as it can be for a kid friendly movie (I’m amazed this got a 15 rating in the UK... this is PG material, surely?).

And, surprisingly, I actually found myself liking it a heck of a lot more than I thought I would. The ensemble of actors are pretty good, especially Page and Diego Luna, who does a pretty good job in the only movie I’ve seen him in other than Rogue One (reviewed here). Give this man some solid lead roles! I also thought the set dressing and choice of compositions around these, quite detailed atmospheres created for the story were all pretty good too. Perhaps more so than the original in some ways although, as I mentioned above, this film sticks to that template very closely, with most of the broad strokes being a repeat performance and mainly just the details of the ‘misdeeds’ of the various protagonists being changed this time around.

Having said that... and this was a bit of a surprise moment for me, hence the spoiler warning... one of the five does die in the film and the rest of the gang doesn’t manage to bring said character back from the dead. This leads, of course, to that character’s inevitable return appearance on ‘the other side’ near the end but that’s okay, it’s a logical progression and it helps move the story forward when this happens. Another difference is that one of the five, the more responsible one of the group, doesn’t flatline at all in this version... which I thought was kinda odd but also interesting.

Now there seems to have been some confusion around whether this is a remake of... or a sequel to... the original Flatliners. Not least confused by this, it seems to me, was Kiefer Sutherland who told interviewers that he would be reprising his role from the first one in this film. Sutherland is in two scenes in this and, although the character name is different, it does seem a natural progression of the character (including a prop I noticed which rang a vague bell... but I’d have to look at the original again before I can confirm that particular something). My understanding is that there was a scene shot for this which revealed that, despite the name change, Sutherland was indeed revealed to be playing the same character and I’ve read that this scene might resurface in a slightly longer cut when it gets released on DVD and Blu Ray. Which will be interesting if it does because, frankly, the fact that a group of medical students playing God in the same way that another group of students did decades before is an interesting touch (I also liked that they got the famous line from the original... “Today is a good day to die.” into the screenplay, this time said by James Norton).

One of the things I do remember about the first version of Flatliners was that it kinda peaked about three quarters of the way through the movie and didn’t really recover after the point where it turned into more of a horror movie. Although this new one is only five minutes shorter than the 1990 one, I did think the pacing and interest on this was a lot tighter... it never gets dull and that can only be a good thing. The ending of this is a little better too. Where the first film ended, if memory serves, with a last minute rescue of one of the five from the jaws of death, this movie ends with a much more haunting epilogue involving a specific tune played on a piano which is a little memento of one of the characters thrown from the spirit world... which slightly contradicts any possibility that the way the brain is changed by death is the key to the various phenomena the group are experiencing but it is kind of a fun nod, it has to be said.

All in all, I wouldn’t say the new Flatliners is any better than the 1990 classic but, then again, I wouldn’t say it’s any worse either and there are some definite improvements to the pacing which counts for a lot. Not a film I feel I could revisit that often but certainly nowhere near the disappointment I was expecting from it. Maybe give it a go if you are not too particularly attached to the first movie and, even then, you might still find that you can appreciate this one.

Split

Split In Image

Split
2017 USA
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Yeah... this pretty much has all the spoilers

Okay, so... if you’re a regular reader here then you probably already know my track record with M. Night Shyamalan is not all that great. He really gets me angry because, in almost every film, his ‘famous twist’ at the end is really obvious and telegraphed right from the start. The Sixth Sense, for example, takes only ten minutes to crack on first viewing. The Village was the worst one for that stuff though... it’s literally the second shot of the movie (which is a reverse shot to the previous if I’m recalling correctly) which is about 30 seconds or so into the film, when the trick ending is made pretty clear in the way the director uses his camera. So I’m not the biggest fan of his storytelling because it’s always so easy to pick up on and his last movie, The Visit (reviewed here) did nothing to change that opinion of his work. About the only time he did surprise me was in Unbreakable, where the nature of Samuel L. Jackson’s character was revealed at the end... so I probably have more respect for that movie than any of his others. I also liked Devil (reviewed here... although that wasn’t actually directed by him, just written from his story idea).

So Split was a movie I kind of put myself through because I quite like James McAvoy but I was pretty sure, on seeing the trailer last year, that it could only have one of two possible endings and so, even before I set foot in the cinema, I was berating Shyamalan for being too obvious. However, the truth be told, he seemed to be banking on me thinking that on this one and... well, I’ll get to that later.

As the trailer suggests, Split is about a man, played by James McAvoy, who is seriously schizophrenic in that he’s holding a multitude of split personalities in his head (23 or possibly 24, to be almost precise). He kidnaps three women, locks them up and is going to do something ‘bad’ to them. And so that’s the general idea and, after the trailer, I realised it could go either way on an ending.

I was pretty certain that one of these two options would be the film’s supposed twist here...

1. Every character in the movie, not just the obvious ones played by James McAvoy, would be another manifestation of his split personality... including the so called victims he had purportedly kidnapped. That seemed like a bit of an easy one even for Shyamalan, though, so my alternative was...

2. Near the end it would be revealed that McAvoy was, in fact, identical twin brothers taking on a large number of personalities each. While the victims had been talking to one or the other manifestations without realising they were talking to differently motivated sets of personalities throughout the course of the movie. This might have made things a little more interesting... was how I was thinking.

As the movie began, from the first shot in fact, I realised Shyamalan had probably gone with the easier option of nobody being real outside of McAvoy’s head. Certainly the way the film was shot and the isolation and lack of interaction in some scenes, plus the constant flashbacks to the abused childhood of the primary kidnap victim played by Anya Taylor-Joy (who was so good in The VVitch which I reviewed here and as Morgan, which I reviewed here) seemed to point right to this kind of denouement.

As it happens, though, M. Night Shyamalan did manage to surprise me but, alas, it was in the least interesting way possible. I had hoped the director may have come up with a third, much more clever option for an end twist but it was not to be. Instead, it was more of a surprise by ommission. Do you remember his movie Signs? I spent the whole of that movie trying to figure out what the explanation was behind the aliens in the movie. What the twist was that turned everything on its head and surprised the audience in an interesting way. However, Signs didn’t have a twist ending, as it turned out. Instead, it basically said that everything in that movie was to be taken as face value and we should just live with the idea that it’s a sci-fi movie. Which didn’t sit well with me, to be honest. Well, in Split, the director heads back to this territory in that there is no twist ending on this movie... everything is there to be taken at face value. Where Shyamalan does get a little clever, then, is by finally adapting his cinematic syntax to mislead the audience to a different conclusion from the correct one, rather than just passively let them ride along second guessing it. The red herrings of the mise-en-scene make the lack of surprise a thing in itself... so, okay, I can at least respect him for this.

I guess my one real grumble out of all this, though, is that just like Signs before it, this makes the film seem somewhat anticlimactic. I wasn’t very happy at the lack of twistedness to the plot here, it has to be said. However, Shyamalan does redeem himself somewhat with a little punchline moment at the end of the movie which, at least, changes your mind about the kind of movie you have been watching up until that point.

So... okay, good things? Well McAvoy is as good as you'd expect as various manifestations of the antagonist's multiple characterisations and Taylor-Joy is also pretty great here, it has to be said. There are some nice shot set ups which, when not trying to make you second guess a different ending, caters to the title with some nicely framed vertical elements which split the shots from time to time. So that’s all good.

The music by West Dylan Thordson is okay too, although I would have preferred to have seen Shyamalan carrying on his immensely creative relationship with composer James Newton Howard, who I think did his best work for the Shyamalan films. Especially since I think that in the last few seconds of the movie they've maybe re-used or tracked in an old theme from an earlier film. I’d certainly buy this score if it was made available in CD format but, alas, it seems once more that I’m not likely to hear it as a stand alone because the only way it seems to be getting a release right now is via electronic download (don’t do it kids... it sucks... make them give the music a proper release.

One of the more stand out moments of the whole experience is that it does have a nice little epilogue scene after the first couple of credits which do put a new slant on the way the movie has been playing out. You do, after all, see one of McAvoy’s personalities eating various people and walking around on walls and ceilings like Spider-Man and once it’s been established that this manifestation is not, surprisingly, in anybody’s head, it then delivers up one little nugget of an end coda which kind of puts the movie into perspective. That being that this whole movie was, in some ways, an elaborate set up for a new supervillain. Yeah, that’s right, it’s an ‘origin story’ for a character called ‘The Horde’. And this is what we take away from the last five or so seconds of the little punchline scene at the end. Set in a diner, some folks are talking about the escaped maniac and one of the diners says it reminds her of that guy that got caught years ago, but couldn’t remember his name. As the diners leave they reveal Bruce Willis in a cameo, reprising his role from Unbreakable and simply saying... “Mr. Glass”. So there you have it... if, and I doubt this but you never know, Shyamalan and Willis ever get around to making their ‘proper’ sequel to Unbreakable, we have a new supervillain for the movie. In the meantime though, this scene firmly identifies Split as an Unbreakable sequel so, for now at least, that’s what we are left with.

Other than that one truly bright moment, however, the film has a lot to admire in it but don’t expect too much from it and don’t expect a twist ending for sure. This is a fairly entertaining ride for a lot of the time (with the usual fun at seeing Shyamalan himself do one of his cameo appearances) but it’s not a great film like... um... well, like Unbreakable was. That being said, it’s not as chronically disappointing as most of his other films either (the jury is still out for The Lady In The Water because I haven’t seen it yet... it’s in the ‘to watch’ pile as I type) and it’s worth a watch for seeing the way McAvoy manages to manifest his various personalities. Not one I would be too bothered with seeing at the cinema but if you’re already a fan of this director then it may be something you enjoy. Not his best but, certainly, not his worst.