Pretty much the only saving grace of this movie was the performance of bug-eyed, scenery-chewing actor Hiroshi Mikami in the lead. Beyond that and some unsettling dream-like sequences at the end of the movie, there's nothing to recommend here. Premonition is slow, the effects are nearly all laughably bad, the story is obvious, and the antagonist of the movie is (MINOR SPOILER HERE) a badly-animated dirty newspaper. (END SPOILER)
Viewers of American TV may be aware of a rather insipid syndicated show about a man who somehow gets the next day's paper delivered to him and then goes around trying to prevent trouble from happening. This is basically the plot of Premonition (and about a billion other bad science fiction stories). Mixed in with this is a very soap-operatic story of the protagonist and his wife trying to get over the loss of their child. The supernatural events which occur in the movie are never really explained, which would be fine if they were more mysterious to begin with, but since they are rather mundane anyways, the lack of an explanation seems like a let-down.
I could go on (in particular, about a scene where someone is stabbed, and the filmmakers decide to use CGI to show blood spreading under this person's clothing -- what, were you afraid to get fake blood on a sweater? Is there some kind of terrible sweater famine in Japan? Come on, people, this is the most rudimentary possible special effect, and it looks about a million times better than slapping some red on the film via After Effects or something). Suffice it to say that this film is a waste of time, and along with Infection (2004) represents an exceedingly poor start for the "J-Horror Theater" franchise.
Viewers of American TV may be aware of a rather insipid syndicated show about a man who somehow gets the next day's paper delivered to him and then goes around trying to prevent trouble from happening. This is basically the plot of Premonition (and about a billion other bad science fiction stories). Mixed in with this is a very soap-operatic story of the protagonist and his wife trying to get over the loss of their child. The supernatural events which occur in the movie are never really explained, which would be fine if they were more mysterious to begin with, but since they are rather mundane anyways, the lack of an explanation seems like a let-down.
I could go on (in particular, about a scene where someone is stabbed, and the filmmakers decide to use CGI to show blood spreading under this person's clothing -- what, were you afraid to get fake blood on a sweater? Is there some kind of terrible sweater famine in Japan? Come on, people, this is the most rudimentary possible special effect, and it looks about a million times better than slapping some red on the film via After Effects or something). Suffice it to say that this film is a waste of time, and along with Infection (2004) represents an exceedingly poor start for the "J-Horror Theater" franchise.