Though Gore Verbinski’s rendition of Hideo Nakata’s Ringu is a slightly downgraded effigy of its forerunner, which I liked, I cannot advocate The Ring because it stands as a blatant admittance that many people are unwilling to watch a film if it contains subtitles or if a newer, bigger budgeted version is available (The Ring’s video release sold more than two million copies within the first 24 hours of its release). Furthermore, films such as these serve as a figurehead for Hollywood’s willingness to placate such cinematic lethargy.
With this in mind, I would refer anyone wanting my opinion on this film to my review of Hideo Nakata’s Ringu and bookmark that Takayama’s character changes vocations from that of a mathematics professor to a videographer due to the narrative’s emphasis of the cursed child’s psychogenetic inheritance via her mother being abandoned in order to allot more time in which to explicate every image found within the malevolent video; the motive for the blighted family’s demises are arbitrarily altered; the central metaphor of technology plaguing society is retained but the impetus for the tape’s existence is slightly modified; and Verbinski includes various references to Alfred Hitchock’s films, most frequently Psycho.
The only improvement made by Verbinski is that the rationale for the curse to run for seven days prior to one’s death is that this is the period of time in which it is estimated that a person could survive within a well (as opposed to the unlikely thirty years as presented in Nakata’s version). However, though Verbinski’s film runs twenty minutes longer, he fails in his exposition of what has occurred in that he attempts to be too subtle for his own good (largely due to his fixation with justifying the tape’s images), thus leaving his viewer to do more grunt work than should be expected given the film’s contents which, if you don’t feel like backtracking (it’s all there, unlike what some critics claim), one need only to refer to Nakata’s original.
Having said this, for anyone who wants to quibble over my rating, you needn’t bother if you haven’t seen the original for you are attempting to make an analogous claim that Fords are better than Chevys without having driven the latter. If you have cruised around both productions, then you have my permission to write your own review.
Learn’d Critic’s Advice: The famed “freak out” scene contained in the film serves as a ready example of picture ratio and feature films. Having watched The Ring in theaters, the aforementioned scene made the entire audience reel back in their seats. However, on a smaller screen, the effect is notably diminished. Thus, films made for the “big screen” are just that and anyone thinking that they’re getting the director’s complete intent by renting a film after the fact (unless you have a drop down screen, a projector, and a really, really spacious living room) need merely take note of this discrepancy.
-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
