Pulse, American Style

I was super-psyched to see this movie, because I had loved the Japanese original, which was so obtuse and subtle I knew that it was particularly ripe for getting massively screwed up when trying to adapt it to something American teenagers might understand and be scared by. In the Japanese version no corpses jump out of laundry machines, we do not see people turning into stains, and there are many things the audience is never offered a direct explanation for, you’re just left to—imagine this—use your own brain power to piece together. I’ll be comparing the two versions a lot throughout this review.

I should also mention that I saw this movie on opening night in a theater full of a lot of teenagers of all races who were in large groups of friends, and who were in the mood to SCREAM. Had I wanted to enjoy the movie as something of quality this would have been annoying, but since I really just wanted to deride it for how badly it dumbed-down what the original film was, this proved to be the perfect audience, and the whole experience was very fun and lively.

The opening credits try to express how prevalent electronics are in our lives. Okay, as IF anyone needs any additional proof of that. We then join our heroine’s boyfriend Josh, who is walking through a library and all freaked out. There is a ghost attack within the first 30 seconds of the movie, wherein Josh is, uh, sucked by a ghost.

Then we meet Mattie, college student played by Kristen Bell of Veronica Mars fame. Mattie and company attend college in the dirtiest, grungiest city Ohio has to offer [we’re setting a movie in OHIO?], and for the first half you’re sitting there like “WHERE is his city? What, is everything a total slum?” The entire city looks like some community college that started with shitty facilities 20 years ago and has been burned, graffittied, broken, and not cleaned every year in between. It’s a bit ridiculous. Mattie is friends with Christina Milian, trying to extend her tepid singing career into a tepid acting career, and two other guys, one black, one Hispanic. Together they truly express the United Colors of Benneton.

Mattie, who needs to take the eye liner down a notch, is concerned by not having heard from her former boyfriend Josh, the one we saw getting sucked in the library. She goes over to his apartment, where she finds the computer on in an equivalent shot to the view of the computer from the original, only a bit more souped up with constantly-moving graphics and such. Mattie finds that Josh has not exactly been hip on cleanliness lately, and has roaches in the sink and—completely weird and unexplained—a crippled, greasy CAT locked in his closet. I don’t know WHERE that came from [or where it went]. Anyway, Josh is there, and he has a nasty black stain on him, and he tells Mattie to hold on while he goes in the other room and hangs himself.

Soon after this all the friends start getting IMs from Josh saying “Help me.” But wait a minute—Josh is dead! So they think that Josh’s computer must be somehow still on and sending them messages that say, “Help me.” So they send a member of their cru over to turn his computer off. He wanders around the apartment, then he sees a woman who comes at him and presumably sucks him as well.

Up until now this movie has stayed fairly close to the original. In the original all the friends worked at a facility studying plants, and the Josh character was delivering a piece of software for them. The apartment is neglected, but not filthy, i.e. no roaches and certainly no wounded cats. The second character who goes to Josh’s apartment actually sees him, turns away, and when he turns back, there is just a vaguely humanoid black stain on the wall. In Japan, this would have a lot of cultural resonance, based on the human shadows left on walls post-Hiroshima. This is one of those things that is very evocative, but not really explained. The character who later goes to the apartment leaves and goes to another basement room in the complex, and that’s where he sees the woman, which makes more sense, as… why is this woman in Josh’s apt? Anyway, the parts in which this movie apes the original end up being the most successful, such as the simple shot of the ghost woman just walking toward the camera. Oh, by the way, in the original, they didn’t get IMs from the dead guy, but phone calls where he said “Help me,” akin to the creepy phone calls in The Grudge.

So anyway, no one has heard from the guy who went over to Josh’s, but they start to connect to this weird thing on their computers that shows pale people looking at them. Mattie goes to Josh’s, where she meets an obese black landlady straight out of Gone with the Wind, who tells her she sold the computer to some refugee from a boy band. Mattie finds him, and discovers that Josh’s computer is in the trunk of his car, and thus couldn’t be sending them messages. Oh my God!

Meanwhile Josh sent them all a roll of red duct tape, with the message “It keeps them out. Don’t know why.” The reason Josh doesn’t know why is that the screenwriter of this movie doesn’t know why, because it’s never explained in the original. You just see it lining the doors and windows of several apartment buildings. You start to notice it and wonder what it’s about, and eventually piece it together, but here, of course, we can’t leave anything unexplained and we certainly can’t count on the audience to piece anything together. In the original the people would just LINE their doors and windows with the tape. Here they cover them completely. I guess that makes it more X-Treme.

SPOILERS > > >
In here we also see several news reports about an unexplained rash of suicides in the area. Then there’s some material about how the people on the campus are dwindling. Again, in the original this was not called attention to. We stayed very closely within the perspective of our main character, and we only see suicides obliquely, until the end, where the movie opens up the perspective and there is a tremendously powerful effect of “Holy shit! This is happening all over and everyone is gone! The world is actually ending!” But here we can’t have anything sudden or anything hidden from the audience, so we have to foreshadow long ahead, in my opinion, losing a lot of the power of this effect in the original. Also in the original the main character is walking down the street, then sees this woman atop a tower. The woman throws herself off, falls, and BAM! Hits the pavement! This is one of those few moments that can make a jaded filmgoer like myself jump out of my seat and say “Oh my God!” It isn’t here. I saw a glimpse of an equivalent scene in the trailer, but I’m thinking they decided it was too much for our fragile American minds. Isn’t it funny how everything has to be X-Treme, and yet we can’t show anything that’s actually extreme?

So here someone goes to another friend’s house and sees the black stuff on his skin. He touches it, causing someone in the audience to exasperatedly say “And he’s gonna touch it!” We actually SEE the guy turn into the stain on the wall, which is considerably more vulgar than the original would ever do. It is also accomplished with CGI, which the original used very sparingly. By this time, the audience I was with was just making cracks. When Mattie’s printer starts printing out a giant puzzle for her [as seen in the trailer], someone shouted “Now let’s see what you have won!” And later, after a creepy monster has jumped out of the washing machine [also seen in the trailer], the guy next to me cackled “That’s it for you, Christina Milian!” Also, I don’t know, is it a common fear that something creepy might jump out of a washing machine? It must be, for as much as it appears in movies from Dark Water to The Video Dead. Later, just before Milian turns to dust, we see her in vivid close-up with a long river of snot running out of her nose and into her mouth, causing the audience to collectively go “Eeeewwww!”

Anyway, since we have to have a chance for hope and a way to defeat the virus, Mattie and Boy Band guy try to find Zeigler, who Josh was in contact with at the beginning. They think he has all the answers. So now we see how the city is deserted, which isn’t surprising since it had been foreshadowed for so long. As I said, in the original, we stayed very much with our main characters, and when we finally saw the city was deserted, it was really shocking, and quite a revelation; we’re not just talking about a few people, we’re talking about the very breakup of society and the end of the world. It was one of my favorite things about the original. Here it’s not that much of a shock. They find Zeigler, and he unleashes a BUTTLOAD of exposition: they were doing some computer shit and found a bunch of “frequencies we didn’t even know existed,” and one of them is apparently DEAD-FM. The dead are seeping into our world, and sapping our “will to live.” The red tape is the only thing with the properties to keep them out. Josh was working on a virus to reverse the whole thing, but they have to get down to the computer lab to put it in the system, and this is ghost central.

So Mattie and mister Boy Band go to the basement, where they are chased by ghosts, and Mattie almost gets her will to live sucked out. If you watch carefully, you can see Boy Band actually PUSH her will to live back into her with his hand. Could someone please push my will to live back into me? And while you’re at it, please push a sense of hope and optimism as well? Thanks. Anyway, so BB uploads the virus, and it works! For like three seconds. So they flee.

We have previously heard that “you’re safe in the dead zones. Places with no computer, cell service or wi-fi.” So they take off to the rolling hills of rural Ohio [SO not accurate… as someone who grew up in Michigan, I can assure you that Ohio is as flat as Paris. Hilton, that is]. They hear on the radio that you have to get rid of your cell phone, so of course the first thing Mattie does is open up her cell phone. They also chose to sleep under giant electrical towers, by the way. They are attacked by ghosts, and finally make it to the human encampments that are in a “dead zone.” We then have some ending voice-over about how “what was meant to connect us to each other connected us to worlds we were never meant to find.” The end.
< < < SPOILERS END

The main difference here [aside from how obvious and in-your-face everything is] is a fundamental change in the focus and point of the movie. In the Japanese version, it was the loneliness and social isolation that all the electronic gadgets were a symptom of that turned people into ghosts. It was a potent metaphor; people’s loneliness actually turned them into ghosts, and the ghosts spread through the devices that contributed to the social isolation in the first place. Therefore, it was the gadgets and the technologies themselves that were the problem. Here the gadgets are no problem, it’s just that we’ve tapped into a bad frequency, and THAT is the issue. For all the loving product placement for technology this film takes advantage of, I guess we can hardly expect it to come out and say that technology itself is bad. And really, Americans cannot be shown ANYTHING that might be seen as discouraging sales. Remember how right after 9/11 we were told that if people stop shopping the whole fabric of American society would crumble? You know how the ONLY solutions to global warming that President Bush is willing to consider are those that can be accomplished by new technology? Technology that will boost the economy? So clearly, a message that consumer products which are a cornerstone of our economy might not be entirely good CANNOT be uttered in the land of the free! The entire idea that teenagers are going to part with their cell phones and Internet because of some shitty low-grade horror movie just underscores how apparently important it is that any anti-technology message be suppressed. The sheer number of people in my audience checking their cell phones for any urgent messages that may have come in while they were at the movies seems to weigh toward the idea that we need not worry.

As I said, in the original, the breakdown of society was handled as quite an effective surprise. In a way, it was like a zombie movie, where you find things are going badly in your backyard, then find out it’s happening through all of society. When the plane crashes at the end of the original, it’s a “Holy Shit!” moment, where you realize that the world is truly fucked. Here it just kind of happens and has no impact. This movie also ends with a note of hope for humanity, whereas the original left us with much darker prospects. I do have to give the remake credit for going as far as it did in [SPOILER!] leaving us with a society that is reduced to living in ragtag shanty towns in rural areas. It could have had the virus work and everything go back to normal [END SPOILER!]. So I guess we should be happy for this small gesture toward the events in this movie having actual consequences.

Poor Kristen Bell picked the wrong movie to make her post-Veronica Mars debut in. It’s too bad, because she projects such canny intelligence on Veronica Mars, but here she is hampered by trying to make the lame lines of the script plausible, and it comes out the worse for her. It’s a little disturbing to see an actress of her promise and intelligence [she was quite an electrifying presence during her short scenes in Mamet’s Spartan, too] having to show her tits on the cover of Maxim and the like. Well, next time, Kristen. We’ll keep on pulling for you. Christina Milian is no worse than anyone else in most movies. The rest of the cast is quite generic and are unable to rise above the script and direction.

As a movie you might want to see, this movie is not as bad as the fact that it was delayed several times and that there were no screenings for critics would lead you to believe. It’s also not that great. Despite that obvious studio shill Earl Dittman says in his blurb: “Like no horror movie you’ve ever seen before or ever will see!” this movie is completely generic and all of the genuine creepiness of the original has been removed, leaving it just a tepid thrill machine in the vein of most low-rent horror movies lately. If you’re totally bored there are worse things you could see, but unless you’ve seen the original and are interested in how they fucked it up, there really is no reason to sit through this.

What Remakes Say

A near-constant area of commentary in anything related to movies recently is how many remakes have been coming out. Their prevalence makes sense from a studio perspective, as the film will have name recognition even before it’s released, and a certain portion of the audience will be interested in seeing it regardless of how it turns out. Once it’s released, it can be amusing to compare the original to the remake, seeing what it chose to keep, what it chose to discard, and how its focus changed or did not change. After viewing quite a few remakes of movies I was familiar with, I began to see patterns in ways that the films were reimagined, what was changed or left out entirely, and those patterns can be interesting to study with an eye to what they say about the ways movie audiences—and by extension, society in general—has changed since the original was made. In order to more accurately examine what these films say about Hollywood’s perception of the current state of American society, I have limited the films discussed here to mainstream films produced by Hollywood, and those released post-2001.

Ideas are not invited
The most noticeable direction in remakes is a shift away from overarching ideas. For example, the original Poseidon Adventure set up a debate between two views of God that would be played out through the action of the story. A few minutes into the film, Gene Hackman’s young priest has a debate with an older priest about the relationship of man to God. The older priest argues for a passive attitude of worship; pray to God and he will help you. Hackman believes that God helps those who work to help themselves, without waiting for divine intervention from above. This debate gets played out through the action of the movie, when what can be considered an “act of God” places all of its characters in a situation in which they must either take action or wait to be saved. The filmmakers seal a major portion of the debate when all of those passively awaiting assistance are killed, but the fact is that the film floats an idea that provides a context and resonance to the action of the film. The recent remake, Poseidon, jettisons this idea entirely and makes no gesture toward trying to supply a greater framework for the action of the film. It is just a survival story where some people live and some people die, with no larger idea uniting it all.

Similarly, the original Amityville Horror, not exactly an intellectual masterpiece, still contained an interesting subtext about the husband’s conversion from Judaism to Catholicism and played with the tensions of that throughout the movie. In the remake, none of that remains. The family has average, mundane concerns and irritations that are magnified by the haunted house they live in, but any kind of wider idea has been completely removed.

Kindly refrain from social criticism
A related but even more prevalent trend is away from films that provide social criticism. The original Japanese horror film Pulse [Kairo] imagined a world in which the social isolation and loneliness created by the technological modes of connection-at-a-distance—cell phones, email, IMs—literally transform people into ghosts and leads to the breakdown of society. In the recent American remake, this idea has been watered down to the point of being negated: in this version the problem is not the technology itself, but merely that humans tapped into “a frequency we were never meant to find.” Where the original criticizes the current state of society using fanciful means, the remake has no problem with the way the world is, so long as we don’t find that freaky frequency—which everyone in the audience knows doesn’t exist anyway. Whew, so we're safe!

A similar example arises from comparing the original and remake versions of the sci-fi sports film Rollerball. In the 1975 original, the fictional game serves as a form of social control by “teaching the futility of individual effort.” The remake jettisons this in favor of a facile statement about how using violence to boost TV ratings is, like, so wrong. In a similar vein, the abundant social commentary of George Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead invited viewers to compare American consumerism as exemplified by mall shoppers with mindless zombies who act only on instinct. Like Poseidon, the 2004 remake throws any larger social commentary out in favor of an ideology-free focus on action and gore. It’s no longer about anything except who lives and who dies.

No character development, if you please
Another trend in most recent movies that is only revealed in higher contrast by remakes is the lack of patience audiences can muster for character development. The remake of Poseidon is the most obvious example, if only because we know that there was a fair amount of character-building material shot that was excised from the released film in order to get to the action faster. This approach may have backfired in the tepid response to the movie at the box office, and the large amount of negative Internet comments along the lines of “why should I care about these people if I have no idea who they are?” The original devoted almost 40 minutes to setting up the individual characters, their histories and hopes, before the disaster happened, under the idea that the audience will be more involved with their stories if they have some personal knowledge about them.

Another example of the move away from interest in character development can be seen in the two versions of Dawn of the Dead. The original features an interesting and explosive dynamic between the four principal characters that changes, deepens and evolves as the film wears on. The remake increases the number of principal characters, accompanied by a corollary decrease in their character traits and flattening of their interactions with each other. One character cries for about five seconds over her recently killed husband, then it’s back to the exploding heads!

But enough about everyone else, let’s get back to me
With what character development is left, the trend clearly seems to be toward the concerns of the individual as opposed to that of society or the group. Again, Poseidon provides an example, as our group of heroes is focused their own survival, rather than concentrating on how they can help the greatest amount of people. Note that in the original, two characters sacrifice themselves so that the others may live, while in the remake, only one character sacrifices himself, while another actually kicks someone else to his death to save himself [and this is one of the heroes]! Even the theme songs reflect the focus away from society and onto the individual. In the original song, note the amount of times that “we” is used to indicate the struggle of a group of survivors… “There’s got to be a morning after, if we can make it through the might. We have a chance to find the sunshine, let’s keep on looking for the light.” In the remake, the focus of the song is on two people, and there’s no more larger struggle, it’s all about, what else—love: “I’ll never let you go, I’ll be the journey and you’ll be the road… together we’ll be hanging on, because all we have is love.”

This tendency toward shrinking a movie’s purview to concentrate only on the love of one couple is also seen in Solaris. In the original, the main character dealt with his feelings about his dead wife, but also his commitment to his parents and his place in the larger society. The remake is all about love, cutting his parents out of the equation entirely. A similar [although pre-2002] example of this trend would also be Titanic. Although it is not trying to be a remake, one can’t help but note that A Night to Remember is about the nobility and generosity of a the human spirit as our characters bravely face certain death, while Titanic concentrates on two characters, and the only interest is in whether they—and their love—will survive.

But what does it all mean?
So do these trends reflect actual shifts in society, or merely Hollywood’s perception of what audiences will respond most strongly to? The answer is probably a bit of both. Americans seem not to want to listen to any ideas or arguments coming from Hollywood—witness the bile reserved for entertainers who dare to utter a political opinion. Furthermore, in light of the ever-decreasing levels of education in this country, ideas can alienate an audience who both don’t see any merit in considering them, and feel insulted if a movie demands thought they are not prepared to put into a film. Better to concentrate on something that everyone, of any educational level, can understand: love.

Additionally, in our polarized social and political environment, ANY ideas—and certainly statements of all but the most tame of social criticism [racism is wrong!]—run the risk of alienating at least part of the audience. So to maximize profits, as well as make the material more palatable to the increasingly important international audience, it’s important to minimize anything that might be in any way controversial.

A trend away from character development and toward decisive physical action; away from overarching ideas, and certainly from ideas that offer social criticism, toward events that happen for superficial reasons—or for no reason: these trends can be seen in most mainstream movies, but remakes provide a direct A / B comparison that bring these trends most clearly to light.