review for Pulse (film)

Wiggett · More Machine Than Man Joined: 06 May 2007 Posts: 2100

Movie Review By: Wiggett

Year: 2006

Directed by: Jim Sonzero

Written by: Wes Craven, Ray Wright

Degree of Cyberpunk Visuals: Medium

Correlation to Cyberpunk Themes: Low

Kristen Bell ... Mattie
Ian Somerhalder ... Dexter
Christina Milian ... Isabelle
Rick Gonzalez ... Stone
Jonathan Tucker ... Josh
Samm Levine ... Tim

Rating: 4 out of 10

Overview: Pulse, is an american adaptation of an asian film called "Kairo" written by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. the film is a generic horror storyline with plot elements that involve some present day cyberpunkery.

Plot: the film starts out with an average lookign american uni student, seemingly outcast from the populace around him as he strolls into school, watching theother students play with their mobile phones and technology. Eventually he finds himself in the creepily lit University library. WHAMO! in the first few minutes of the movie we are hit with our evil monster. Now introduce our main quartet of insta-gib targets; Mattie, Izzie, Tim and the afro guy. They sit at some college-university party in Anybar(tm). the afroguy, introduces the group as some sort of web savvy youth who know their laptops from their fizznits, and whizzbangles. Basically SMS was so popular in 2006 that writers wanted to show off the fact they looked up a wiki article on leet speak. (wait was wikipedia around then?!) Our main cahracter, leading lady Kristen, sets up the scene of her boyfriend (Josh) who has drifted apart in the past week, she then leaves the party to walk home down darkened pathways in a daze only to be startled by her lovelorn friend Tim. She fobs him off and goes about discovering her boyfriend in his shoddy apartment, BUT WAIT! he is somewhat distant and zombie like with a black bruise on his neck. But don't worry about the dead cat because TADA! boyfriend commits suicide.

the story then goes on a run about how there is some sort of computer virus sweeping the town (and later, the WORLD!) making people kill themselves. BUT WAIT THERE IS MORE! It turns out the virus isn't actually a virus! It's a bunch of entities that have crossed the dimensional plane into ours after some telecomm tech heads discovered a new bandwidth. Now with most of the quartet, Mattie must help her new found boyfriend Dexter upload old boyfriend Josh's super system crash virus which is supposed to crash the new bandwidth system and stop these ghosts.It ends with the system rebooting itself, and the surviving humans must live without technology, away from the cities with phone/wi-fi signals which are now inhabited by these ghoulish molesting ghouls.

Conclusion: the film is pretty average, though I haven't seen the Kurosawa film it is based upon, it seems to just be a regular hollywood horror film that teens will watch with their high school sweeties. Either that or it was some sort of derranged paranoid warning about the upcoming bluetooth technology of the time. Either way, it starts out with some potential, but kind of runs like some sort of "dealing with youth suicide" counselling program, but by the third act turns into a generic monster movie with plotholes galore. There are hints throughout the movie that it wanted to go in a different direction, but why it didn't I can't be sure. On a side note, colleges in America need to work on their lighting schemes, seriously who want's to sit in a poorly lit grey toned library? Ghastly dimensional jumpers I guess...
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SSJKamui · Keyboard Samurai Joined: 27 Jan 2008 Posts: 853

Thanks for the review. Thumbs Up

I am very glad to see that you join us reviewers. the more reviewers we have, the more flexible this site becomes and we are also able to cover a wider range of media on the site.

I also thought about considering Pulse (and its original, Kairo), but I haven't seen these movies yet. (Although I love J Horror movies like Ju On, because of the bad reviews of the movie in most media, the movie had a rather low priority to me. )

From what I heard, the movies are about the Hikikomori phenomenon where Teenagers lose touch with reality and in a certain sense build there own artificial "reality" by using Media and IT Technology. (From what I understood, it's a kind of real world variant of this: http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Holo-addiction )

iHME · Cyberjunkie Joined: 09 Jan 2011 Posts: 298

That plot description reminded me of Stephen King's book "Cell", it was translated here with the title "Pulse"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(novel)

the plot is surprisingly same, except that it has a computer virus uploading it self to people's heads and turns them in to a zombie horde, which later gets psychic powers.
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