Yuck.
danieljparsons from ,
2nd January, 2010
Well, this is just plain bad. There's a germ of a good idea here (possibly put to better use in Kairo, the Japanese film of which this is a remake which I've not seen) but it's absolutely fudged in the execution. Ghosts (or spirits, or malevolent beasties or whatever they're supposed to be) find a way through to our world by means of a virus on the internet (ahem), which soon spreads through PDAs, cellphones, electrical cables etc. These nasties 'infect' the living, suck out their souls and turn them into suicidal wrecks - though the infected don't seem to follow through with taking their own lives until they first spook their friends, infect them and/or spout off some sage advise ('they're gonna get you too!'). There could be a metaphor here for how the new digital age has made us all soulless, cell-phone/internet dependant junkies, but it's one that gets troweled on too thick in the beginning and then promptly forgotten by twenty minutes in. And for a film that's so reliant on depicting technology in use to foreshadow its (horribly CGI rendered) ghosties, it doesn't even have the decency to be technologically savvy. So we get the cliché of chat-room conversations being conducted at light speed, characters making calls on their cells to their friends by typing in the numbers (hello, never heard of storing numbers?), and since when do text messages get received centrally aligned? Little annoyances add up and it becomes increasingly hard to suspend any kind of disbelief. Pulse starts bleak and goes down from there - the whole movie drained of any bright color and the actors either playing their roles in mumbled/sombre mode or shrill and exaggerated. According to the credits the script was co-written by Wes Craven, but there's none of his trademark black humor or sardonic dialogue, and the teen-speak is unconvincing. There's no sense of the passage of time here, and the story goes from affecting a small circle of characters to, risibly, THE WHOLE COUNTRY in what seems like a few minutes. There are precious few scares since the CGI work is unimpressive and you know when something is coming because the telltale green/screen outlines appear, or the music-score suddenly screeches in out of nowhere. The most effective moment occurs in the background of a shot when a figure circling the top of a tower suddenly jumps to their death, a genuinely jolting moment that this film otherwise completely lacks. The downbeat, apocalyptic ending could also have helped to make the film worth watching had the decision to put a pretentious, irrelevant Terminator 2 style voice-over not been made. Even the presence of personal hero, the inimitable Kristen Bell, is not enough to save this.
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