As Hollywood continues to suck the blood out of 1980’s and 1990’s cinema to appease their hungry gods and their demands for still more crimson liquid, news on yet another remake has come to life. And, whereas this morning’s news about a Romancing the Stone remake had me chomping and gnashing and damning people I’ve never met, I can’t say that I entirely hate this newest idea, particularly because it comes pre-packaged not with a pie in the sky list of possible lead actors, but with a genre-appropriate screenwriter. Talented, inventive writing! How about that!
Sony has just signed Source Code scribe Ben Ripley to a development deal to write “a contemporary reimagining” of Joel Schumacher’s Flatliners. The original film hit theaters in 1990 with one of the most awesomely nineties-era casts to ever gather in service for a sci-fi flick about kinda dead people. It starred Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts and William Baldwin, Oliver Platt, and Kevin Bacon as medical students who begin to experiment with near-death experiences to see just what’s on the other side. Of course, there are consequences to having your heart stopped repeatedly to get a glimpse at a realm that the living aren’t meant to see. Who knew?
Not much else is known about the direction Ripley will take the film, but the writer has already proven himself adept at traversing both experiences and locations by way of the human mind and its perceptions, so Flatliners seems like a perfect fit. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe not all remakes are the tools of the devil. [Deadline Rock Island]