I know for a fact that I have seen the original Flatliners, but for the life of me, I cannot seem to remember what happened. I remember Julia Roberts and Kiefer Sutherland, and I seem to remember scenes where somebody fell out of a tree and died, but that’s about as much as I can muster. That’s not a knock on the movie so much as it is an indication of when it came out; all of those movies I stumbled upon at my local Blockbuster as a kid seem to blur together.

But with the recent news that Flatliners might be more of a straight sequel to the original film, it looks like I might need to take a longer trip down memory lane. Kiefer Sutherland recently talked to Metro (via /Film) about his role in the upcoming Flatliners movie and discussed how his character from the original film found his way into the new one as well.

I play a professor at the medical university. It is never stated but it will probably be very clearly understood that I’m the same character I was in the original Flatliners but that I have changed my name and I’ve done some things to move on from the experiments that we were doing in the original film.

You can scoff at the idea of a Flatliners remake all you want  —  there certainly isn’t a huge portion of the internet clamoring to see those characters on the big screen again  —  but I tend to think that more studios should target movies like Flatliners for remakes. Flatliners was an original idea with so-so execution; it did well enough to have some lingering cultural memory but not so well that missing on a remake would cause its studio a bit of embarrassment if the movie doesn’t work (see Cop, Robo). With a cast that includes Diego Luna and Ellen Page, Flatliners seems to have the right talent in place to be a surprise improvement upon the original.

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