Pulse (2006 film)
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| Pulse | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Jim Sonzero |
| Produced by | Neo Art & Logic |
| Written by | Wes Craven Ray Wright |
| Starring | Kristen Bell Ian Somerhalder Christina Milian |
| Music by | Elia Cmiral |
| Distributed by | Dimension Films (USA) Paramount Pictures (UK) |
| Release date(s) | Image:Flag of the United States.svg August 11, 2006 |
| Running time | 90 minutes |
| Language | English |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Pulse is an American film released on August 11, 2006, based on the 2001 Japanese horror film Kairo directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. It stars Kristen Bell, Ian Somerhalder, and Christina Milian. The Weinstein Company distributed the film in the United States through its Dimension Films label. Neo Art & Logic produced the film and Jim Sonzero directed the script written by Wes Craven and Ray Wright. The film's release date was originally March 3rd, but was ultimately moved to August 11. It appears similar to Stephen King's Cell.
Contents |
[edit] Story
Pulse opens with Josh entering a dark university library intending to meet Douglas Ziegler. There he is attacked by a humanoid spirit that sucks the life force out of him.
At a bar with her friends, Mattie begins to wonder why she has not seen her boyfriend Josh for days and later decides to visit his apartment. Mattie finds Josh sitting alone, his skin pale and lifeless. He asks Mattie to "stay here" and he walks to a room at the end of a hall. Mattie finds a sickly looking cat starving in a closet, then walks to the next room to find Josh has committed suicide by hanging himself with an ethernet cable.
Back at the university, Mattie and her friends begin to chat online and receive text messages from Josh which say "Help me." Assuming that Josh's computer is still on and there is a virus creating the messages, Mattie's friend Stone agrees to disconnect the computer at Josh's apartment. Stone finds though, that the computer is gone. Hearing noises, he enters a bedroom and finds a window that has red tape over the entire glass. The door slams shut and a female spirit steps out from the shadows. Stone hides behind a bed, thinking he is safe. But when he looks up, he sees the sickly pale face of the female spirit looking back down at him over the edge of the bed. Stone screams.
Mattie continues to receive messages from Josh and visits his apartment once more. There she learns that the building superintendent has sold Josh's computer to a young man named Dexter McCarthy. Mattie visits Dexter and blames him for the messages, but he shows her that the computer is locked in the trunk of his car. After Mattie leaves Dexter, he connects Josh's PC together. When it starts, it asks the question: "Do you want to meet a ghost?" The screen displays one web cam scene after another of strange and contorted people, many of whom are committing suicide, who seem to be staring back at Dex through the screen.
Mattie receives a package that Josh mailed two days before he died. Inside are rolls of red tape and a message that reads "It keeps them out. Don't know why. -J". Later on, Dexter finds Mattie and shows her video messages Josh was sending to Douglas Zieglar. Josh had hacked Zieglar's computer system and stolen and distributed a virus. This virus had released or unlocked a portal that connected the realm of the living, to the realm of the dead. Josh believed he had coded a counter to the virus and wanted to meet Zieglar at the library. As well Dex finds Josh's work on a memory stick taped inside the PC case with the same red tape.
Later Tim goes to Stone's apartment, only to find him being sucked into a black space in the wall. Tim tries to pull him out but Stone is absorbed into the wall and turns to ashes. Tim then runs home and tapes all his windows and door with red tape, only there isn't enough tape to cover the entire door. He then hears a noise in the hall. He pulls the red tape off of the peephole and sees a ghost. The glass in the peephole explodes, letting the ghost into the apartment.
Later that night, Mattie's roommate Izzie is down in the laundry room. She is putting some of her dirty clothes in the washing machine, and suddenly the door at the end of the room closes by itself, and the door to a dryer machine swings open. Then the wet clothes begin to "plop" on the floor, seemingly thrown out from inside. Izzie walks over to investigate, and a spirit with four arms pops out and steals her life force.
Later, Mattie returns home and looks for Izzie. She finds her in her room, covered in unsightly black bruises. They both sit down on the couch and Mattie asks "What do they want?" to which Izzie responds, "They want what they don't have anymore. They want life." Then Izzie stands up and says "It's time.....I'm sorry Mattie" before evaporating into a cloud of black ash that's blown out of the window. Mattie, frightened, runs out of her apartment and goes to meet up with Dex again.
Dex and Mattie visit Zieglar. After entering his room they find it's entirely plastered in red tape. Zieglar tells them of a project he worked on for wide-band Internet access and telecommunication purposes. Zieglar found "frequencies no one knew existed." Opening these frequencies somehow allowed the evil entities to travel to our world. Zieglar explains that after they get a hold of you, they "take away your will to live". He tells Mattie and Dex that the main server is in the basement of Computer Center.
Leaving Zieglar in his room, they go to the basement and Dex uploads Josh's "fix." It causes the system to crash and the entities vanish, but moments later the system reboots and the ghosts return. Dex and Mattie barely escape the entities that are chasing them throughout the building. Once outside, a passenger jet plane crashes into the building across the street from them. When they turn around, they see a large group of ghosts on the roof of the building. Dexter hotwires a toyota pickup and Mattie follows over to him to escape the city.
They pull over to sleep, and Mattie is awakened by a radio report from the Army announcing the location of several "safe-zones" where there is no Internet, cell phones, or television. The safe zones are made in blackout areas. The announcement says to get rid of all cell phones, PDAs and other electronic communication devices. Mattie looks up to see her cell phone on the dash. She opens it and sees she still is receiving a signal. Then she and Dex are attacked one more time by a few more restless ghosts, but start driving, and when Mattie's cell loses coverage, the entities disappear. They continue to drive towards the safe-zone. The film concludes with a voice-over from Mattie saying "We can never go back. The cities are theirs now. Instead of bringing us together, technology actually connected us to forces that we could have never imagined. The world we knew is gone, but the will to live never dies. Not for us, and not for them." The last clips show them arriving at a large military refugee camp. Next it shows one of the abandoned cities, and a window of an apartment as Josh looks through it.
[edit] Production and promotion
The teaser trailer for Pulse actually features footage from the original Japanese film, Kairo. One shot in particular features a large falling military plane crashing into a building. The plane crash sequence was entirely remade for the U.S. release, and features a passenger plane crashing on top of a building instead of a military plane. Also, in several versions of the trailer, it shows a man jumping off a large factory tower, but this scene only appeared in the unrated DVD version of the film, as an example of the many suicides. There is a dream sequence where Mattie is talking to Josh on top of a tower. The unrated 90-minute DVD version came out on December 5, along with the PG-13 fullscreen version.
[edit] MPAA rating
PG-13 for Intense Sequences of Sci-Fi Terror, Disturbing Images, Language, Sensuality and Thematic Material.
Certain shots had to be cut and scenes had to be trimmed to obtain a "PG-13" rating - namely the scene of Josh's suicide.
[edit] Box office
The film grossed an estimated $8,203,822 in its opening weekend (August 11-13, 2006) in the United States and Canada. At its close on October 12, 2006 the film had grossed a total of $20,264,536 domestically. Foreign box office was $7,643,127, for a worldwide take of $27,907,563, as compared to a production budget of approximately $20,500,000.[1] As a DVD rental the film has grossed another $25.01 million in revenue.[2]
[edit] Reception
Pulse critically flopped receiving an aggregate score of 12% from the critics and an average of 3.5/10 on Rotten Tomatoes.[1] Critics commented on perceived missing social commentary in the American version, which they saw as resulting in nothing more than a series of scares created for the purpose of shock value.[2]
[edit] Taglines
- "You are now infected."
- "There are some frequencies we were never meant to find."
- "Do you want to meet a ghost?"
- "Your Life disconnects here"
- "Technology can be SCARY.."
[edit] Cast
| Principal Characters | ||
|---|---|---|
| Role | Actor | |
| Mattie Webber | Kristen Bell | |
| Isabell Fuentes | Christina Milian | |
| Dexter McCarthy | Ian Somerhalder | |
| Stone | Rick Gonzalez | |
| Tim Steinberg | Samm Levine | |
| Josh | Jonathan Tucker | |
| Webcam Man | Carlos A. Alvarez | |
| Uber Phantom | Joseph Gatt | |
| Landlady | Octavia Spencer | |
[edit] Differences between Kairo & Pulse
This film is different from the original in many ways. The Japanese original focuses on society and questions about both suicide and the end of the world, specifically the belief that death and the afterlife are nothing but eternal loneliness.
The American remake's focus is technology and bringing the dead back through a new form of communication, focusing on the phenomenon of Instrumental TransCommunication. While it has scenes that have characters drawing connections between suicide and loneliness, it has little plot relation to the original movie, instead creating its own story and using scare elements of its original.
[edit] Sequels
Bloody-Disgusting has learned that Joel Soisson will write and direct both sequels to PULSE. Both movies will be direct-to-video and will not feature the stars from the first movie. He most recently directed Buried, The Prophecy: Forsaken and The Prophecy: Uprising for Dimension. He also produced Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, Feast, Dracula 2000, Phantoms among others.
The first sequel is titled PULSE: AFTERLIFE
The world has been reshaped by the invasion of ghosts via the wireless internet. Cities are deserted, technology has been destroyed and the few remaining human beings eschew anything electrical in order to avoid a confrontation with the soulless ghosts that now wander the planet. Most of the ghosts are doomed to a repetitive loop of something they did while they were still despairing humans (a man repeatedly hangs himself, for example), but there are some ghosts so locked in denial, they do not know they are dead. They continue to haunt their homes, wrapped in fear that their souls will soon be torn from them.[3]
The second sequel is titled PULSE: INVASION
It is now seven years later and the survivors on Earth have settled into a primitive lifestyle completely void of electronics. The clusters of human survivors live together in refugee camps as the phantoms have taken over the cities. Justine is now a teenager and she escapes to the city to try and make a life for herself where she is not a drain on her adopted family (her parents both became phantoms in part one). She heads in to the city at the urging of Adam, a seeming survivor in the city that lures her with promises of understanding and friendship.[4]
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- Pulse at Rotten Tomatoes
- Pulse at Box Office Mojoit:Pulse (film 2006)
nl:Pulse zh:猛鬼寬頻
