Pulse

(2006) *1/2

Bleck! This movie is a textbook lesson in how to take something cool and make it suck. My god. It really doesn't deserve effort on my part to form whole paragraphs, so I'll just hit the bullet points.

-- In the original, there's the implication that the afterlife is fundamentally flawed. In this one, researchers for a cell phone company researched their way into new, unknown frequencies and that's what opened the door for the ghosts. Not a bad idea in itself, but a bland, over-explained version of the original.

-- Also over-explained, when the phantoms attack you in this movie they get up in your face and suck a ghost version of your face out of your face. This is your Will To Live. Those so effected have blackened veins like a plague, and eventually either kill themselves or get sucked screaming into a shadow.

-- At too soon a point in the story, Kristen Bell notes that people are just not around anymore. The spreading of the threat doesn't sneak in to the movie, it barrels in with horn blasting.

-- In the opening scenes we're struck over the head with the idea that "gosh, cell phones are just everywhere now." Every single extra is texting someone, groups of guys in parking lots will all be talking and laughing while looking at a laptop that one of them has, etc. I know that wireless connections are everywhere now, but it's just unrealistic and stupid.

-- In the original, the detail of the red tape that can seal windows and doors against ghosts is delivered with art and subtlety, in this movie it's delivered in the mail with a big note explaining "this keeps them out somehow."

-- Finally, in the end Kristen Bell and Boone from Lost head into a safe zone with no cell signal, and in a voiceover Kristen observes the irony that "these things designed to bring us together instead brought a terrifying threat." Arrgh! The thematic point of original was the loneliness and solitude that's been largely created by modern communication. I honestly wonder if they referred to the wonderfulness of cell phones in order not to piss off whichever company they were doing product placement for. Dammit.


I suppose it's worth noting that this movie does have Kristen Bell in it, and I think she's a hottie. She and the other actresses wear a lot of different tight shirts, so much so that Julie asked me if this movie was about boobs.

Like I said up top, I think the following is a potentially good idea: strange, hostile beings that exist in electromagnetic spectra who gain access to our world because of the opening of new communication frequencies. But not as a remake of the excellent Kairo! They totally missed the point. What a surprise.