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Dom Robinson reviews 
Columbia TriStar
- Cat.no: CDR 92461
- Cert: 15
- Running time: 110 minutes
- Year: 1990
- Pressing: 1999
- Region(s): 2, PAL
- Chapters: 35 plus extras
- Sound: Dolby Digital 2.0 (Dolby Surround)
- Languages: English, German (both DD 2.0)
- Subtitles: 14 different languages available
- Widescreen: 2.35:1
- 16:9-Enhanced: Yes
- Macrovision: Yes
- Disc Format: DVD 5
- Price: £19.99
- Extras : Scene index, Theatrical trailer, Filmographies
Director:
- Joel Schumacher
(8MM, Batman And Robin, Batman Forever, The Client, Cousins, Dying Young, Falling Down, Flawless, The Lost Boys, St. Elmo’s Fire, A Time To Kill)
Producers:
- Michael Douglas and Rick Bieber
Screenplay:
- Peter Filardi
Music:
- James Newton Howard
Cast:
- Nelson: Kiefer Sutherland (Bright Lights Big City, The Cowboy Way, Dark City, Eye For An Eye, A Few Good Men, Flashback, The Lost Boys, Renegades, Stand By Me, The Three Musketeers (1993), A Time To Kill, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, The Vanishing, Young Guns 1 & 2, )
Rachel: Julia Roberts (Conspiracy Theory, Dying Young, Mary Reilly, Michael Collins, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Mystic Pizza, Notting Hill, The Pelican Brief, The Player, Pret-A-Porter, Pretty Woman, Sleeping With The Enemy, Something To TalkAbout, Steel Magnolias, Stepmom)
Labraccio: Kevin Bacon (Apollo 13, Diner, A Few Good Men, Footloose, Friday The 13th, He Said She Said, JFK, Murder in the First, National Lampoon’s Animal House, Picture Perfect, Planes Trains and Automobiles, The River Wild, She’s Having A Baby, Sleepers, Tremors, Wild Things)
Joe: William Baldwin (Backdraft, Born on the Fourth of July, Fair Game, Internal Affairs, Sliver, Three Of Hearts)
Steckle: Oliver Platt (Benny And Joon, Bulworth, Dangerous Beauty, Doctor Dolittle (1998), Executive Decision, Funny Bones, Indecent Proposal, Married to the Mob, Postcards from the Edge, Simon Birch, The Three Musketeers, A Time To Kill, Working Girl)
Flatliners takes five American medical students, one of which wants to see what lies beyond death and then live to tell the tale. When Nelson achieves his task, three of the remaining four also begin to get ideas above their station. However, as if bringing someone back from the dead wasn’t enough to bring about tension, old feelings and experiences are reawakened and one by one the students are forced to confront their demons from the past.
Kiefer Sutherland plays Nelson, the first to go under, a man with a clear sense of direction to begin with, even if he has doubts later on. There’s very few films in which I can easily watch Julia Roberts, this being one and My Best Friend’s Wedding
being another, but here she, William Baldwin and Kevin Bacon each have their doubts about effectively killing themselves, but their curiosity gets the better of them. Oliver Platt, stays wise to the facts by opting not to find fame the easy way and chronicles the events into his dictaphone.
Perfection is the name for the picture quality on view here. A bad encoding job could easily have helped the disc to fall apart at the mixture of blues and reds on display, but someone at Columbia deserves a big pay-rise for doing such a fine piece of work for one of my favourite films of all time.
The film is presented in its original widescreen ratio of 2.35:1, the only way of doing complete justice to a Joel Schumacher film, especially one where the director of photography is Jan De Bont, who later went on to direct the actioners Speed, Speed 2 and Twister. The image is enhanced for 16:9 widescreen televisions which provides 33% higher resolution – and the average bitrate is 4.78 Mb/s.
The sound quality is also spot-on. James Newton Howard’s incredible score plus the sound FX as one encounters the after-life come across without a hitch. Just make sure the volume’s loud. Since full multi-channel Dolby Digital hadn’t been born yet, the Dolby Surround mix is translated to Dolby Digital 2.0 for this DVD release, so it should sound excellent whatever your hardware.
Extras :
Upon selecting the “Start Movie” option, you’ll first see a “Sony Pictures DVD Center” logo, the copyright info and then the film itself.
Flatliners is one of the few films that I fell in love with the first time I saw it, even if it hasn’t got the most coherent of plots. After seeing the film in the cinema, the haunting score by James Newton Howard over the end credits kept me hankering for a soundtrack CD, but just my luck that a rare thing occurred – a film without such a CD to accompany its release, even in America and I know as I made several enquiries.
Things went from bad to worse in early 1991 as the retail video release approached and I crossed my fingers that the unwatchable fullscreen version would be accompanied by a widescreen version, but to no avail, even later when a PAL Laserdisc was announced since when Joel Schumacher shoots a film in 2.35:1, there’s no compromise possible when it comes to constructing a pan-and-scan image.
Overall, this release fares better than the USA equivalent which also contains an anamorphic widescreen print, but while it has three language options, it has only two subtitle options, no trailer nor any other extras, apart from a pan-and-scan version which is about as useful as…well I think you can guess. The UK version also has a slightly higher average bitrate: 4.78Mb/s compared to Region 1’s 4.58Mb/s on the widescreen side.
FILM : ***** PICTURE QUALITY: ***** SOUND QUALITY: ***** EXTRAS: ** ——————————- OVERALL: ****½
Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 1999.
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.