Ghosts in the machine

The squalid, concrete architecture and the Eastern Bloc haunt of the streets of Bucharest, Romania, do not bear even the slightest resemblance to the tree-lined quaintness of Middle American Columbus, Ohio. That the makers of the remake of the apocalyptic Japanese ghost story Kairo try to pass off the former for the latter implies an exceeding lack of confidence in the worldliness of their target audience (perhaps justifiable), and a seeming contempt for the material itself (as displayed here, entirely justifiable).

Failing to maintain any semblance of internal logic, Pulse takes an interesting premise and renders it incomprehensible. A hacker breaks into the database of some Ohio State University researchers who have come across a previously undetected frequency that contains either the spirits of the resentful dead, electronic demons, or an alien race … it is never really spelled out satisfactorily.

Breaking the code unleashes these beings to prey upon the living through the conduits of their cell phones, computers and BlackBerrys, spreading a virus that sucks the will to live from the victims and eventually reduces them to a flurry of greasy, black ash … unless they kill themselves first, as the now-infected hacker does. His ex and her two friends are aided by another hacker in their goal of sitting around and acting confused, to be picked off one at a time in typical horror-film fashion, in accordance to their attractiveness.

While the original wasn’t all that scary in its own right, it nonetheless was permeated with a building sense of palpable dread, and delivered with a handful of memorably haunting images. The remake either discards what made the source material noteworthy or renders it pedestrian.

Even the ending gets changed from one of existential melancholy to a relatively upbeat one that echoes the coda of the first Terminator … although what may be upbeat for anyone over the age of 30 may be one of lingering despair for a generation weaned on cell phones, computers and BlackBerrys.