I’m aware that this is going to merit a lot of viewer’s ire in my granting Hideo Nakata’s sequel, The Ring Two, a star rating while refusing to even score Gore Verbinski’s blockbuster effort, The Ring. However, once one considers that Nakata didn’t merely remake his own work, Ringu 2, with American actors and actually reexamined his previous work while attempted to improve upon it, one can perhaps see where my aesthetic leniency is derived.
Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) and her son, Aiden (David Dorfman), move from Seattle to the small town of Astoria, Oregon in an attempt to flee from the memories of a cursed video tape they encountered half a year before. However, shortly after settling into her new job at The Daily Astorian, Rachel learns that the curse is continuing to spread throughout the area upon the news that a local teen named Jake (Ryan Merriman) has recently died from suspicious circumstances. In a naïve effort to rid the world of the plight, she locates the destroys the tape which caused Jake’s death yet this prompts Samara (Kelly Stables), the girl whom haunts the recordings, to seek vengeance upon Rachel via Aiden.
What irritates most viewers about The Ring Two becomes a paradox when compared to the popularity of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. Yes, many dislike Nakata’s tale because he abandons the threat posed by Samara via the cursed video tape in order to explore other regions which interest him. With this in mind, one could easily step back and state that this is mere exploitation in that he gratuitously uses the popularity of his forerunner to get audiences to watch an (almost) entirely new concept. Yet the irony stands in that Wes Craven did the same with New Nightmare in that his thesis is that monsters lose their power while constrained within the fictional realm of film. In this sense, any monster would do, even a new one, but Craven likewise guiltlessly uses his own creation of Freddy, thus saving himself the time of coming up with a new villain, atop garnering automatic ticket saves for those who are willing to watch anything that the character of Kruger appears. Though I have nothing to go on, I’m pretty sure there are some fans of the American director’s seventh installment in the A Nightmare on Elm Street series which are currently wading in the waters of hypocrisy when it comes to Nataka’s work.
Instead of placating American audience’s plot lethargy, Nakata attempts to climb the Holy Mount of Horror by creating a sense of dread and anxiety in his audience instead of going for gratuitous, fleeing moments of easily dismissed shocks, which is the well-tread backyard route that most American horror sequels take knowing that the readymade audience is only there for more of the same.
What Nakata formulates in the wake of Verbinski’s film is a meditation upon guilt extending to fear (ironically, one of the key themes in Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street as well as Nakata’s own Japanese sequel), epitomized in Rachel’s reassurance to Aiden that “We didn’t do anything wrong. We did what anyone would do.” However, after another person’s death occurs as a consequence of Rachel’s bringing the video in the area, we watch as Watt’s character begins to fret that, like Samara’s biological mother, Evelyn (Sissy Spacek), she too is failing in her role of apt parental caretaker (Nakata also briefly revisits another of his themes in Ringu 2, that of science’s inability to contend with the effects of the supernatural due to the field’s unwillingness to recognize it).
I would be interested in the reactions of mothers to the film because Nakata knowingly nods at his core audience in this regard by having Rachel insinuate to Max Rourke (Simon Baker), a fellow journalist, that he can’t possibly understand and truly appreciate the weight of what he is involved in because he isn’t a parent, no less a mother. Thus, though I can sympathize with Rachel’s guilt, fear, and especially pain at having to harm her son in hopes of saving him (thus the image of water seen during the film serves as a intuitively juxtaposed symbol of life as well as death), I cannot claim to sincerely empathize with her plight, which is where the film’s power ultimately lies.
Also, two other notes of interest include a sedate applause for Henning Lohner, Martin Tillman, and the consummate Hans Zimmer in their creation of a very adequate score which admirably adds the film’s progression, especially in its final quarter, as well as the surprising amount of restraint that special effects guru Rick Baker exhibited in his creation of Samara (making her all the more prunish given her circumstances and current residence). However, a merit deduction must be allotted to those many hands responsible for the less-than-believable pack of CGI deer witnessed during the film.
Hideo Nakata’s The Ring Two is a vast improvement and reimaging of his previous work, Ringu 2. However, many American viewers won’t be able to aptly judge this claim because of their unwillingness to watch foreign originals when they can merely go to the American version without the hassle of subtitles. To truly appreciate the film, one must do the historical research, otherwise one is liable to naively criticize a work like Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove without knowing the history of the Cold War Era. However, I can understand the multitude of unfavorable reviews which The Ring Two generated because Nakata took many of the critics in areas they didn’t want to go, that is, outside of another rehash of curses expiring upon their seventh day (which culpably admits how well American sequels have trained audiences to accept and expect narrative reiteration and complacency) atop the fact that Nakata brings his own culture into the storytelling, which has never been a big hit with mainstream American audiences due to thematic xenophobia, thus the reason we don’t have Japanese blockbusters here in the States (or any other foreign film for that matter but, ironically, American films are constantly well received in other nations). With this in mind, The Ring Two–if nothing else–poignantly points out the fact that American audiences should be blushing instead of bitching.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
