Technology and horror have met in movies before. Some of those encounters have been good (The Ring) and some of those encounters have been bad (Stay Alive). Pulse is in the latter category. This film is a lifeless, uninteresting, remake of a Japanese horror movie called Kairo. With little ingenuity, the entire 85 minutes, from start to finish, is perhaps the most painful time you’ll have to sit through. The characters are not characters but are just cardboard cut-outs meant to fill the screen. The pacing of the film resembles that of an industrial factory. The director, Jim Sonzero, was reading from the horror cliché instruction manual. Take a character. Isolate the character. Add ominous music. Kill the character. Repeat.
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It is 2027, 19 years after the youngest human being was born, and hours after his murder. In a world that makes the 9/11 aftermath look positively cheerful, a detached journalist has to deliver a pregnant refugee into the hands of a syndicate that will be able to protect her from the totalitarian administration. Children of Men is Science Fiction. Or is it?
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I’ll get into the politics of this film later, but first let me say it’s a quintessential entertaining Hollywood movie. The cinematography is superb. The script is tight and even in the moments that seem clichéd, you get through them quickly and realize they are necessary to give the plot momentum. In fact, the movie’s pacing is remarkable. It never slows down to a point where you lose interest for even a moment. I wanted to call Blood Diamond the “Constant Gardener of 2006” but that movie was really much, much slower and in the end far less engaging.
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A great injustice in cinema happened in 1978 when Richard Donner was replaced as director for Superman II with Richard Lester. The controversy over it was that both Donner’s Superman and the sequel were being filmed by Donner at the same time. The choice was made to focus on the first film and come back to the second later. The producers didn’t like Donner’s handling of the character and his filming methods, in spite of the fact Superman : The Movie turned out to be a hit. The majority of Donner’s footage for Superman II was either re-shot or scrapped. Now, thanks to internet campaigns, fan curiousity and hard work, Donner’s footage has been edited into a new version of Superman II.
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It took Hollywood a while to come up with a strategy about how to handle 9/11. There were stories to be told and heroes to be celebrated, but it seemed like no-one wanted to be first in doing so. God forbid you’d be accused of commercially exploiting the largest ever terrorist attack on the USA. Director and writer Paul Greengrass found the perfect way to avoid that. Not only did he donate part of the movie’s earnings, he also found exactly the right cinematographic style to depict the events of that day.

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