Shikyo's Ratings: 3 outta 5 PoPcOrNz!
It's scary enough to watch from one movie to the next...
(I'm easily addicted to thriller/horror films hehe)
It's entertaining enough to keep me watching to the very end...
(I was up at 2:30 am on a weekday night lol)
The two movies follow a very similar plot: the main character (a husband) losses his beloved ones in an unexpected accident, struggles to deal with the deaths... stumbles across something called EVP and finds the dead eager to tell him who's going to die. Being the heroic main character that he is, he believes it's his newfound purpose to save these doomed lives. And of course, both end up trying to save a woman... because we all know it's utter blasphemy to make a movie of a man saving another man =|
For simplicity sake, I shall refer to the first movie as "White Noise" and the second as "The Light." But first, let's explore a bit into the paranormal world...
So, what is EVP? It stands for electronic voice phenomena, wherein the voices of the dead are recorded ...yes, you guessed it... electronically!
Does the movie make EVP believable? Sure, if you believe in such things as the afterlife, or evil invisible being(s) out to bring harm to the physical world. Personally, I found it an interesting and creative idea. But I just didn't like how The Light used religious connotations... it doesn't make it anymore real, so why bother? Oh wait, I'm an atheist so I can't really speak for all.
There really isn't much continuity between the two movies. Granted, both center around EVP, but other than that... perhaps the only other thread tying the movies together is the reference The Light made to a character called Mary Freeman who was saved in White Noise. This is so that the sequel can take that extra ONE step further from the existing girl-is-going-to-die-and-hero-has-to-save-her plot by introducing a new element: the horrific consequence of saving a life.
I dunno why but I like the taglines for the movies:
White Noise - "Too little, too late."
The Light - "If you save a life...you are responsible for it."
Anyway true to all scary thriller suspense movies, you'll expect the following from both movies:
- people dying, people screaming
- flashes of scary images
- scary music, sudden loud noises
- er... did I mention people dying?
Surprisingly there isn't really any gore in both movies... so those with faint hearts are saved.
That's basically the gist of the movies. You don't need to waste any bit of brain power figuring out what's happening. There are no plot twists. There's even some "huh?" moments which leaves you wondering if the writers wrote themselves into a corner and couldn't find an "out" to explain everything nicely so they just decided to pull out a magick bunny out of their magick hats. At the end of it, I still don't believe in invisible being(s) of any kind nor do I believe in any sort of afterlife. But if you enjoy movies like Final Destination or The Ring or Sixth Sense, you might find White Noise and The Light straight up your alley.
* S * P * O * I * L * E * R * S *
Here's where you stop reading
if you haven't seen the films,
because I'll be ranting about things
that would not make sense to you =P
* A * H * E * A * D *
~ White Noise ~
It never explained why people only died if they were seen/heard on BOTH Jonathon and Raymond's tapes. It also never explained why Jonathon was seeing/hearing things that hadn't yet happened. If EVP is some sort of communication from the dead, wouldn't the dead have to be dead first before they could begin their communique?
The next plausible reasoning is that the Already Dead knows who will die before the Soon To Be Dead do die, but how would the Already Dead know what audio / visual message the Soon To Be Dead would want to convey to the living when they eventually met death?
White Noise: The Light tackled this problem easily by making Abe able to see who's going to die and not hear / see any meaningful messages...
~ White Noise: The Light ~
Close to the end of the movie Abe dies and his spirit/enegry/spark travels along electric lines to intercept the ambulance because he needs to kill his girl friend whom he had saved before she kills other people.
- Okay, he's travelling on an electrical conduit, sure...
Then up ahead there's an overturned oil truck that's blocking maybe half the road, and of course, a bus full of innocent people waiting to be blown up right beside it.
- Right... One of those wrong place, wrong time coincidences.
To top it off our good ole ambulance driver keeps looking away from the road, distracted with all the screaming going on at the back and then he asks for the time. Lemme repeat that: the ambulance driver asks for the time.
- Er okay... I'll account this to some bogus medical procedure... why the driver needs to tell the supposedly trained paramedic how to do his job is beyond me. The asking-for-time part is only important for the viewers because 7:30pm is exactly when she goes nuts and people are supposed to die.
Tthen Abe magically manifests himself into a visible ghost and kills his girl friend by overloading her heart... or something but the end result is that she flatlines.
- Huh?
And again he magically manifests himself in front of the oil truck for the ambulance driver to see and magically forces the ambulance to swerve away from impending doom.
- Huh?? Let's go back to EVP 101: People can only see/hear these "ghosts" when its played back on electronic devices. And only Abe's senses were tuned into the EVP channel because he underwent a near-death experience. This is the big "What The..." moment. It's disappointing because the entire movie builds up to this ONE moment. And this is what we get?!
Finally the ambulance overturns and lands on a spot that's wide enough for the damn bus to pass through.
- ...lulz xD
The last scene of the movie ends with the other NDE EVP user haunted by the ghosts of the innocents who were killed by the people he saved.
- Nearest I can account this is to some sort of meaningful "Retribution"-type thing, I'm guessing... since there's religious connotations in this film
* * * * *
Tidbit of information brought to you by your friendly neighbourhood Wiki : Electronic voice phenomena are speech or speech-like sounds, which are inaudible during recording but detected on electronic recording media upon playback. They are typically brief, usually the length of a word or short phrase and are sometimes said to be in direct response to the questions of researchers.
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