Kiyoshi Kurosawa is certainly one of Japan's best current directors. His directorial fingers are impeccable. Unfortunately, as a screenwriter, I think he's hit or miss. This is my sixth Kurosawa film, and that makes exactly half I loved, exactly half I disliked or was largely indifferent toward. Cure, Charisma and Bright Future are brilliant films in both mind and body. Seance, Doppelganger and Pulse all bored me to a certain extent. Pulse is great in its technical senses. The cinematography and the sound editing are both pretty impressive. But the script is just poor. It's no surprise that this mediocre film is the one Kurosawa film that has been chosen for an American remake. I wonder if the director purposely sold out with it. It's a pretty standard J-horror plot (ghosts start appearing on the internet), and it seems geared toward teenagers. The effect is only slightly better than a Hideo Nagata movie (IMO, he's the biggest hack working in Japan right now). The characters act like complete morons and the dialogue is often horrendous.
