Pulse

Mr. Pat

12 hours ago

4 min read

I had to wear a face mask for the first time since COVID. No, I wasn't sick. The city of Toledo had a HAZMAT situation where everyone within a one-mile radius was evacuated. The chemical leak happened in north Toledo, but the smell was strong downtown. Even inside the station, it was almost unbearable. I forgot how uncomfortable those N95 masks were, but at least they hid the smell to a tolerable level. Oh yeah, the shows looked pretty great too. With that said, let's talk about...

Pulse (2006)

Last October I reviewed the original Pulse from Japan, so I figured why not check out the 2006 American version? I enjoyed Pulse, probably more now than I did then, and I definitely appreciate it more after watching the American version.

We kick off the movie with a young man named Josh walking around a creepy library while looking for someone. There's an older gentleman in there with him who is there to be creepy and give him annoyed looks. While walking around, we get plenty of spooky antics: noises, lights going off and finally a ghostie who pops up, grabs hold and then sucks the life force out of him.

We then cut to a group of friends, led by a very young-looking Kristen Bell. She has a sort of relationship with Josh, and when she goes to check on him, he's aloof and then excuses himself so he can hang himself with internet cables. From there, Mattie (Bell) and her friends try to figure out what happened to him. The deeper the investigation goes, the more her friends start getting caught up in the crossfire and suffer a similar fate to Josh. They later learn that because of something that Josh was working on, they discovered frequencies that they didn't know existed, and that somehow allowed the dead to come back. The dead are not a fan of the living, so when they attack, they suck the life out of you, and you lose everything that made you you until you either turn into dust or commit suicide.

It's interesting when looking at both movies. They tell the same story, but they are so different it's hard to call them the same. The Japanese version has a very deliberate pace. They have one scene that is widely regarded as one of the scariest in movie history. But the movie is so reliant on atmosphere. It is so heavy and oppressive that it never really lets you get comfortable; there are no jump scares, but there's a sense of dread in every scene. It has a dreamlike quality to it, and I really dug the atmosphere. It's very restrained and lets the mood do the heavy lifting. Even at the end, when the world has seemingly ended, it's very understated. The world is just... empty.

That was way more unsettling than the American version. It's like they watched the movie and did away with everything unique and foreboding about the original, and dialed everything up to 100 while having the subtlety of a brick to the head. While the original went for a slower pace, this movie has ghosts popping out of the woodwork, chasing people and yelling "Boo!"

In both of these movies, the ghosts take away your will to live, and you either kill yourself or you kind of disappear. I loved how the original did it where characters would just kind of slump against the wall, defeated, and then just kind of fade away into a dark stain on the wall. It happens to one of the characters in this one, but he's screaming out like he's in pain before he phases into the wall, which completely changes the dynamic of what's happening. This one wanted the visual, so it sacrificed one of the most disturbing aspects of the movie. Like, imagine you're walking down a hallway, and it's covered with the remains of people who just kind of... stopped being.

Hmm, as I write this, I realize I've only been comparing it to its counterpart, and I suppose that's not fair. It's not exactly going out on a limb to say an original is better than its remake. So I'm going to talk about some things that I liked. Kristen Bell is good in the role, and I like her friend group, even if they're not around long enough to make much of an impact. The guy she ends up teaming up with isn't bad either, but he comes in a bit later once everyone else is mostly sidelined. I liked that it decided early it wasn't going to be a shot-for-shot remake, so it went balls to the wall and had the ghosts front and center and a LOT more active. I also really enjoyed the pulsing effect the computer servers had when the ghosts were taking over. I'd never seen that before, but it was a neat visual. I couldn't help but stare at the servers over everything else when they were on screen because I'd never seen that before. I also liked how they kept the red tape as a way to keep the ghosts out, although they took it to the extreme. In the original, they'd cover the crack between the door and the frame, but in this one, there's a character who has taped off every inch of his apartment.

It's not a good movie, but it's serviceable. It's pretty entertaining; just don't expect anything more than some jump scares consisting of creepy faces and loud noises. It has some problems, and a scene where one of the characters somehow makes a miraculous escape off-camera left left me scratching my head. Still, it's relatively short, and you can see Kristen Bell before she got big.