The Ring
Movie Review
"The Ring"
Review by Eric D. Snider
Grade: A-
Rating: PG-13
Released: Friday, October 18, 2002
Directed by:
Cast:
Within five minutes of "The Ring" beginning, one teen-age girls say to another, "Have you heard about this videotape that kills you when you watch it?" I admire a film that gets right to the point, and efficiency is just one of "The Ring's" many virtues. It is also the scariest film of the year (so far), weaving suspense and horror through a clever story that keeps you guessing right up to the end.
Like most truly scary movies, "The Ring" has almost no onscreen violence and very little gore. The terror is in the ideas. And some of its ideas are genuinely startling.
There is a videotape full of surreal, seemingly random images circulating in Seattle. According to the legend, after you watch it you immediately receive a phone call in which an ominous voice says, "Seven days." Then, exactly one week later, you die.
Investigative journalist Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts, far hotter than any reporter I've ever seen in real life) hears of the videotape after her niece apparently falls victim to it. She and three of her friends watched it together, and now they're dead, in separate incidents. A surviving friend, who luckily was not invited to the party that night, tells the tale. Rachel locates the tape, watches it, and sure enough, gets the phone call. The clock is ticking. What is the tape, and how does one stop it from carrying out its plan?
Rachel enlists the help of her friend Noah (Martin Henderson), and the film becomes a good old-fashioned mystery, complete with red-herring characters and missing puzzle pieces. The images on the tape turn out to be not as random as they seemed, and the evil inherent in a murderous videotape has reasoning behind it, too. Stopping it becomes the issue, and that task makes up the bulk of the film. (We arrive at Day 7 with half the running time remaining.)
Director Gore Verbinski has previously given us the children's film "Mouse Hunt," as well as last year's goofy "The Mexican." "The Ring" (a remake of a Japanese film) is his first attempt at horror, and he does a masterful job with it. He uses -- but doesn't abuse -- the tricks of the trade, employing jarring sound effects, creepy children and anxious pauses to great effect. One is reminded of "The Sixth Sense" and "The Others," particularly in the sense that, like those films, "The Ring" always seems to have more on its mind than its surface-level ghost story. It's not profound, especially, but it's more than rampant, senseless evil.
The answer to the question, "Why is it called 'The Ring' instead of 'The Tape'?" is particularly chilling.
Very few of the elements are completely original, and I can't say every aspect of it makes sense in the end, but the movie as a whole has a fresh, exciting air about it. It maintains a palpable feeling of dread and tension primarily by implication and some carefully chosen eerie images: drowned horses here, weird little girl there, and so on. There is a point where it crosses over from giddy-suspenseful to flat-out wet-your-pants scary, which is something few films in recent years have managed.
Grade: A-
Rated PG-13, scattered profanity, fleeting grisly images, disturbing themes and scariness
1 hr., 55 min.
Copyright © Eric D. Snider.
This work may not be transmitted via the Internet, nor reproduced in any other way, without written consent from Eric D. Snider.
This item has 4 comments
November 3, 2007 at 12:19 am
When comparing it to the Japanese film, I shudder. It really should be illegal for Hollywood to take a foreign film, put blonde hair on it, and call it something new. What I found interesting is they eliminated the reason why Samara/Sadako made the tape. She didn't want to be "remembered" or "loved", the seventeen year old had Testicular Femminization Syndrome, and was unable to pass on her genetics by having children. So she made the ring tape, with the intention of giving all who watched it a hybrid of smallpox and her own DNA, so she would "live on", though the smallpox killed them, ironically. That would make a much better movie story than a semi mute child glaring at you through a tv.
November 3, 2007 at 1:37 am
What an amusing comment. Have you ever even seen the film "Ringu"? Those elements aren't in it. They are in the original novel and the Korean remake but not the Japanese film. (Perhaps it came up in a sequel, I don't recall, but definitely not in the original.) It's always delightful to see someone complain about westernization when most of the "changes" they're decrying were already done in the original country. But of course, the lionization of Asian horror in general rarely seems to me to be about film or art, but about proving what a sophisticated individual you are. Why, your analysis of the film is so sophisticated that you like it for elements that aren't even present! Now that's deep. If you prefer the original, fine. But when the "reasons" you come up with are so patently, factually incorrect, you'll have to forgive me for suspecting that your reasons are rooted in personal egotism rather than any consideration of film or art.
Also, your interpretation of 'The Ring' is wrong. Samara didn't want to "be remembered" or "loved", she just wanted to kill, which is made abundantly clear in the epilogue. Granted, they try and change this in the sequel, but that doesn't apply to this film directly, as it is an after the fact revision which, frankly, doesn't align with this version.
November 4, 2007 at 8:53 pm
I didn't see the original and probably never will (although I did see this one with two japanese foriegn exchange students who said they liked both movies.) All I know is that this movie scared me so much that I ended up in a fetal position in the chair at the movie theater with my jacket next to my face -- just in case. I couldn't watch the movie again for two years and I was surprised by how much I didn't see the first time because I closed my eyes.
Even now, five years later, a staticky TV makes me a wee bit nervous.
June 29, 2008 at 4:32 pm
I saw parts of this movie (I was only nine when it came out, give me a break) and it gave me nightmares for weeks. I am now fifteen and am genuinely disappointed when I see yet another trailer for yet another horror film featuring, typically, a small Asian child in white with long, black hair, black eyeliner, and who moves like a spider (i.e. The Grudge, etc.). I mean, really, got originality?