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THE RING
Rating: 
USA. 2002.
Director – Gore Verbinski, Screenplay – Ehren Kruger, Based on the 1998 Film Ring Written by Takahashi Hiroshi and the Novel by Koji Suzuki, Producers – Laurie MacDonald & Walter F. Parkes, Photography – Bojan Bazelli, Music – Hans Zimmer, Visual Effects Supervisor – Charles Gibson, Visual Effects – Asylum (Supervisor – David M.V. Jones), Method Studios (Supervisor – Alex Frisch), Pacific Title and Digital (Supervisor – David Sosalla) and Rhythm & Hues (Supervisor – Mark Rodahl), Special Effects Supervisor – Burt Dalton, Makeup Effects – Rick Baker, Production Design – Tom Duffield. Production Company – Bender-Spink Inc/DreamWorks SKG.
Cast:
Naomi Watts (Rachel Keller), Martin Henderson (Noah), Brian Cox (Richard Morgan), David Dorfman (Aidan Keller), Amber Tamblyn (Katie Embry), Rachael Bella (Becca), Jane Alexander (Dr Grasnik), Lindsay Frost (Ruth Embry), Daveigh Chase (Samara Morgan), Shannon Cochrane (Anna Morgan)
Plot: Seattle journalist Rachel Keller becomes intrigued with the mysterious circumstances surrounding the sudden death of her niece Katie. She learns how both Katie and Katie’s also now-deceased boyfriend are reputed to have watched a cursed videotape – after one watches the tape they purportedly receive a telephone call telling them that they have seven days before they die. Investigating further, Rachel finds a copy of the videotape. She watches it and is spooked to receive such a phone call immediately after. Next she begins to experience a series of supernatural occurrences. Within the seven days left she tries to trace the images on the videotape and uncover a disturbing tragedy involving murder and suicide.
The Japanese-made horror film Ring (1998) was an enormous hit throughout Asia. It inspired not only two sequels, The Spiral (1998) and Ring 2 (1999), a prequel Ring 0: Birthdays (2000) and a tv series Ring: The Final Chapter (1999), but also an unofficial South Korean remake Ring (1999). In America such popular hits never go unnoticed and The Ring is the inevitable English-language Hollywood remake of Ring. The process over the last few years of conducting English-language remakes of foreign-language films is invariably one that has proven filled with miserable flops – the likes of Three Men and a Baby (1987), Point of No Return (1993), The Vanishing (1993) and Just Visiting (2001). Indeed one stretches to find many decent films to emerge out of this remake fad.
Ring 98, for all its massive success, was a relatively crude film that had a novel idea and a couple of good shocks, which sat alongside some often cheap directorial effects and a rather messy plot explaining it all. The simple Hollywood polish that has been lavished on Ring 02 evens much of that out. Furthermore the script from Ehren Kruger does an eminently worthwhile job of padding out of the backstory to the events. Ring 98 was somewhat murky in terms of explaining the suicide of the mother and the death of the girl down the well. The Ring devotes much more time over to telling a more coherent (slightly different) story, not to mention explaining the nature of the ring and the seven-day warning. There is the odd slightly contrived addition – like now making the heroine’s son prescient in an unnecessary attempt to mimic the eerily mediumistic children of The Sixth Sense (1999). That said Ehren Kruger is still stuck with a plot that never seemed that easy on the screen first time around – Ring 98 started off really well as the story of a haunted videotape but never quite sustained this as it segued into a story about events from the past demanding retribution in the present. Ehren Kruger smoothes it out a great deal, but there still seems an incongruity in the essential nature of Samara – at some points she seems a maligned murdered ghost child simply wanting peace and at others a malevolently evil force.
What really makes Ring 02 work is the superbly brooding atmosphere that director Gore Verbinski manages to evoke. Verbinski began directing at DreamWorks SKG with the enjoyably silly children’s film MouseHunt (1997) and then went onto the flop Brad Pitt-Julia Roberts romance The Mexican (2001) and later the huge successes of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Curse (2006) and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007). Gore Verbinski inherited The Ring after the project passed through the hands of several directors. (It was at one point to have starred Jennifer Love Hewitt). None of Gore Verbinski’s other films ever suggested that he was anything other than a competent commercial craftsman. But he makes The Ring a quite remarkable film. In fact he succeeds in sustaining the suspense and atmosphere far better than the Japanese original and its sequels ever did.
Verbinski and cinematographer Bojan Bazelli succeed in imbuing every frame with a superb sense of disquiet and unease. Bazelli shoots wonderfully beautiful and bare Washington State exteriors – lushly subdued greenery beneath gray skies, barren seashores. Images of ladders against a wall, something as trivial as Naomi Watts reaching up to a shelf or Martin Henderson opening a file drawer all seem to brood with an ominousness. There is one exquisitely lovely shot where Naomi Watts steps out onto her apartment balcony and we see her outlined against the gray facade of the entire apartment block before she turns and looks about into the other apartments around her at the sheer normalcy of the tv images that other people are watching.
Verbinski replicates most of the major scares from Ring 98 to variable effect – the scene with Sadaka/Samara’s hand reaching up from the well doesn’t produce the same jump the second time; although Verbinski does a good variant on her climactic emergence from the tv. However Verbinski produces a number of eerily original shocks of his own – the really uncanny moment where Naomi Watts starts choking and reaches down her throat to pull out a strand of hair several feet long out, finally ending in of all things an electrode; the startling image of a horse escaping from its pen and rearing about on the deck of a ferry, before in a disturbing shock image diving overboard; and the eerie moment where Naomi is able to reach into the paused video screen and pluck out a live fly. Most of all though Verbinski’s success is in creating a sense of something haunted making itself manifest and an eerily overlapping tapestry of supernatural imagery beneath the fabric of everyday life. There is something in the sense of the loomingly preternatural and the constant mandala of repetitive visual motifs that suggests that all-time classic Don’t Look Now (1973).
The Ring Two (2005) was a disappointing sequel, while The Ring Three (2009) has also been promised. The Ring was parodied in Scary Movie 3 (2003).
The success of The Ring prompted a whole spate of other Asian horror Hollywood remakes including The Grudge (2004), Dark Water (2005), Pulse (2006), The Eye (2008), One Missed Call (2008), Shutter (2008) and the upcoming likes of The Echo (2008), Possession (2008) and A Tale of Two Sisters (2008). Indeed The Ring’s executive producer Roy Lee, who later formed the Vertigo Entertainment production company, has come to specialize in buying up Asian film properties for remake by Hollywood.
Screenwriter Ehren Krueger received a reputation with non-genre works like Arlington Road (1999) and Reindeer Games (2000). Since then Krueger has begun to specialize in genre scripts with the likes of New World Disorder (1999), Scream 3 (2000), Impostor (2002), The Brothers Grimm (2005), The Skeleton Key (2005) and Blood and Chocolate (2007).
(Winner in this site’s Top 10 Films of 2002 list. Nominee for Best Director (Gore Verbinski), Best Actress (Naomi Watts), Best Cinematography, Best Musical Score and Best Makeup Effects at this site’s Best of 2002 Awards).
Copyright Richard Scheib 2003
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