The Ring
SCREEN & SCREEN:
There’s this videotape, see, and if you watch it, god help you. Somebody calls you on the phone. Says you have seven days to live. And when those seven days are up, down to the last second- you die. Badly.
Japanese Version (Ringu):
Buy this!
Some movies do not benefit from advanced hype. Most movies, actually; there’s something about hearing so much about one thing that throws people into a snit, because either you’re sick of it, sick of getting shoved down your throats just how great what you’re missing is, or else your expectations are so flipping high that, when you actually do get around to catching what everyone else is talking about, you are immediately let down. You become bitter. You start posting on-line about how big a crock of bull such and such is, how it’s just smoke and mirrors, how everyone who was actually dumb to like such and such is the biggest dope since who knows when.
We all know this. We were around when The Blair Witch Project debuted, after all. But what we also know (and don’t always talk about) is that sometimes a bit of prep before-hand is a good thing. Sometimes having someone tell you “This movie scared the crap out of me” serves to enhance your enjoyment of the movie. For most of us, what we imagine is infinitely more terrifying than any movie, book, or Carrot Top routine. And when we get our imaginations working over time, trying to figure out just what the hell could be so scary as to garner all this attention, well, then we’re all the more susceptible to suggestion when we try and see the thing first-hand. We fill in blanks we might not have if we weren’t prepared.
I do, anyway. Which is one of the reasons, I think, that enjoyed Ringu so much (the American version as well, but I saw Ringu first, and I need some sort of wind up to talk about it); I’d read a review or two about how great it was, about how it terrorized most of Japan, and the throwaway comments popping up on message boards were even more affecting. When I finally found a copy of the movie, I put it into the VCR with no little anticipation, and the film did not disappoint.
Ringu works by hint, insinuation, implication- above all, it works by mood. There are very few deaths in the movie, and practically no gore. Nobody chases anybody down a long corridor filled with shadows. Things are quite well lit. Too well lit, to be honest; the world has a washed-out look, like it has passed beyond the usual and gone into the land of gray. There’s doom hanging over you from the very first sequence to the very last shot. Not enough to keep you from hoping the characters will make it out okay, but enough to give you a very real fear that they won’t- and even worse, neither will anybody else.
Plot-wise, it’s interesting, although the characterizations are a bit scant. (The movie is based on a novel by Koji Suzuki, and what I wouldn’t give to get my hands on an English translation of that.) There are quite a few ideas thrown about that resonate the more you think about them, and how often do we get that in modern horror?
I will refrain from mentioning further until the Compare/Contrast section. Which, let’s get it out of the way now, will be spoiler-rific, so if you haven’t seen this or the American version yet, you should watch out.
A word must be said about that frickin video tape that does all the damage. It’s eerie. You could say that about the whole movie, but the tape is like a shot of pure spooky directly into your veins; each image is there for a reason, story-wise, but you don’t know that the first time you see it, and you don’t care. I watched this movie a month or so ago, and there are a few things about it that stayed with me strongly. Most of them came from the video. Freaked me out but good.
American Version (The Ring):
Buy this!
It goes without saying that I did not have high expectations for this movie. Hollywood has a long history of taking brilliant foreign films and dumbing them down for our consumption; stuffing them with trite cliches that, in the eyes of studio execs, make the original more “palatable” for an American audience. While Ringu is not the most brilliant movie in the world (spine tingling doesn’t require perfection), it is unique and foreign enough to give me worries that a new version would sand down the curious parts, take away the soul of original in order get the fast food tie-in. After all, if they weren’t going to change anything, why did Dreamworks buy the rights to the original and then remake it, instead of releasing a subtitled version to theaters?
So I was reluctant to see the film. I heard a few good things on the ‘net, some bad. Enough positive, though, to get me to go to the theater last night and find out for myself. And here’s a phrase I’ve been using over and over again since last night: I was pleasantly surprised.
The Ring takes the same premise as it’s Japanese cousin, and many of the same scenes and character relationships, but it changes enough to be it’s own movie. For once, those changes are not for the worse. Viewed on its own, it’s a solid, intriguing thriller, a horror movie that is not about teenagers, not about chainsaws, not about post-modern irony. While there are antecedents, it’s original enough that you can watch it without getting a case of de déjà vu-blues, and that’s a rare thing with any studio release these days, let alone a horror picture. (Need I mention Swimfan, or what the called it in the 80’s, Fatal Attraction, or what they called it in the 70’s, Play Misty For Me?)
Naomi Watts, who got a whole lot of well deserved attention from her debut in Mulholland Dr, takes over from Nanako Matsushima as the lead; she’s a good actress, and while the role doesn’t require much more than the ability to gradually freak out, she handles herself well. (She’s also super hot. Course, so was Nanako.) Her son, played by David Dorfman, is adequate, and he has moments of excellence. Marin Henderson as Noah, estranged husband and video tape expert, is also decent, although maybe it’s me, but I’m getting damn tired of the whole “generic Gen-X guy.”
More importantly, director Gore Verbinski and screenwriter Ehran Kruger, are on their game. This is a movie that belongs almost entirely to the man behind the camera, and Verbinski rises to the challenge admirably. There’s nothing I hate more than a movie that tries for an “edgy” atmosphere and fails; something like The Astronaut’s Wife, where instead of caring about the characters, I’m thinking, “Man, what a shiny kitchen!” While The Ring is definitely not filmed realistically, it’s tone works- things are unreal, but just close enough to normal to put you constantly off guard.
Kruger, who previous work (Arlington Road, Scream 3, Reindeer Games) has mostly impressed me due to the sheer awkwardness of its “twists,” turns out to be capable of intelligent work when he’s not trying to pull a Sixth Sense on us. It’s not Chinatown, but it’ll do- and he (and Verbinski) obviously have a great deal of respect for the original, which is worth a lot of points.
COMPARE/CONTRAST:
Again, word of warning: if you haven’t seen either version of the film, unless you want to ruin any chance of being surprised by them, you shouldn’t read this.
The big two changes in the American version of Ring are:
1.In Ringu, Ryuji Takayama (Hiroyuki Sanada) is a psychic researcher, prone to visions and experienced (as much as any living human can be) in dealing with the worlds beyond. This is eliminated from the remake. Takayama’s powers are used to reveal a large chunk of the story a third of the way through the film, while Noah is forced to investigate in person what his foreign counterpart received via brainwaves.
While this change eliminates some of the neater visuals of the original (I missed particularly the scene where Takayama, sitting outside, and is accosted by a pair of dead feet), this is compensated by Rachel’s increasingly fractured view of reality, and an ease off of one’s suspension of disbelief. In Ringu, we have to buy into a deadly video, a series of paranormal experiments, and a lotta of ESP; in Ring, there’s just the tape, and its creator, and not a whole lot more.
Besides, in the end the visions are no more than an easy way to handle exposition- more important to the story is the estranged husband’s connection with his wife, and his son, and this is present in both versions.
2. The biggest change is probably to the origin of the film’s villain, if villain is the right word to use here. Named Sadako in Ringu, and Samaro in Ring, she’s dressed in white, her face obscured by long black hair; Samaro, however, is much younger than Sadako, and we see more of her face. We lose the jerky, freakish aspect of Sadako’s movement- when Samaro makes her one (and only, really) appearance in the real world, she is not as alien, and admittedly not quite as frightening.
Sadako is the result of an illicit relationship between a doctor and patient. Her mother is as prone to visions as Takayama, and becomes involved with a scientist interested in studying (and perhaps exploiting) her unique talents. When Sadako arrives on the scene, her existence is kept hidden, low-key; her only true public appearance is when the scientist attempts to show of the mother’s talents to the press. When some scandal-minded reporters accuse her mother of faking, Sadako reacts in a rage by killing the hecklers with her mind. Her father is not pleased with this, of course, and his eventual solution to the problem she represents is horrifying.
Samaro’s history is a bit more clouded. Her parents, Anna and Richard Morgan, had spent a lifetime trying to conceive a child. The way the locals tell it, the two of them went off on a trip and adopted a new baby girl; however, they never tell anyone where the baby came from, but it’s clear that there was no adoption. Samaro is Anna’s daughter, although whether or not Richard is her father is not immediately clear. From the start, Richard doesn’t trust the child. He puts her up over the barn, in a room near the horses. Their constant noise bothers Samaro, and horses start dying all over the island. Tragedy strikes one of Anna’s horse shows, and the woman starts to lose her mind; she sees strange visions. Richard, convinced that their daughter is the cause of all their woes, commits the young girl to a sanitarium.
At the institution, the docters discover that Samaro never sleeps. One asks her about this, but she is unresponsive. He also asks about the pictures she’s drawn, and she starts to talk about her father, how he thinks she is “hurting” people. She admits she is, and that she can’t stop- more, even, that she doesn’t want to stop, although she’s sorry. (How sorry is she? From her expression, it’s hard to tell. There’s an interesting connection made at one point in the film between the Morgans’ woes, and the difficulty of loving and caring for a handicapped child. Samaro was born different; perhaps she has no true understanding of what she’s doing, and can only sense dimly that it’s wrong.)
Again, a horrific fate befalls the child at the hands of a parent- but this time, it’s the mother who destroys the child, driven to the point of madness by the awful things her daughter has done to the world around her. The father is a passive figure; he pushed Samaro as far away from himself and his wife as he could, but he will not take any action himself to end her.
These changes, on the whole, serve to make the story surprising even to those of us who’ve seen it before. There’s enough ambiguity here to make me want to watch both movies again (and to leave me with the sure knowledge that I’ve messed up the above summaries), but the basics are easily graspable, and not so full of holes that you lose focus of what’s really important: the fates of our leads, and the deadly danger of their adversary.
Both Ring and Ringu are strongly dominated by women. It’s two girls who first tell us about the cursed tape; it’s a woman who starts the investigation; it’s a mother who gives birth to a “gifted” child; and it’s a girl who is at the heart of everything, a force of rage and guile so powerful, so strong, that in the end she can never be stopped, never destroyed, simply appeased. Men in either film are, at best, victims and givers of false hope; at worst, figures of impotent hate. (True, the scientist in Ringu is the one who ultimately murders Sadako; but he is for the most part an observer, whose attempts at understanding and control of the world inhabited by Sadako and her mother result in death and end of his career.) In the end, I think, that’s what stuck with me the most out of the movies, that conception of a world where only women can truly understand the fully consequences of actions, and only a mother can see through to saving (or killing) her child.
I’m not the one to say which movie is better. I enjoyed Ringu a little more than The Ring, but that might have been the freshness of the initial viewing, and my general irritation with basic American cinematic tropes. Regardless, I freely recommend either to anybody.
SCREEN (Japanese): QQQQ
SCREEN (American): QQQ.5
NOTE: Try not to see this in a theater full of teenagers. It has nothing to do with them and they tend to get rowdy when ignored.
There are a ton of reviews out there on these films, most of them with more research than mine. Here are a few that I ripped off:
Braineater (an overview of the entire series, excluding the American version)
Stomp Tokyo (Japanese version only)