The Ring Movie Trailer. Rarely has a more serious effort produced a less serious result than in “The Ring,” the kind of dread dark horror film where you better hope nobody in the audience snickers, because the film teeters right on the edge of the ridiculous.
Enormous craft has been put into the movie, which looks just great, but the story goes beyond contrivance into the dizzy realms of the absurd. And although there is no way for everything to be explained (and many events lack any possible explanation), the movie’s ending explains and explains and explains, until finally you’d rather just give it a pass than sit through one more tedious flashback.
The story involves a video that brings certain death. You look at it, the phone rings, and you find out you have seven days to live. A prologue shows some teenage victims of the dread curse, and then newspaper reporter Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) gets on the case, helped by eerie drawings by her young son, Aidan (David Dorfman).
The story has been recycled from a popular Japanese thriller by Hideo Nakata, which was held off the market in this country to clear the field for this remake. Alas, the same idea was ripped off in August by “feardotcom,” also a bad movie, but more plain fun than “The Ring,” and with a climax that used brilliant visual effects while this one drags on endlessly.
I dare not reveal too much of the story but will say that the video does indeed bring death in a week, something we are reminded of as Rachel tries to solve the case while titles tick off the days. A single mom, she enlists Aidan’s father, a video geek named Noah (Martin Henderson) to analyze the deadly tape. He tags along for the adventure, which inevitably leads to their learning to care for one another, I guess, although the movie is not big on relationships. Her investigation leads her to a remote cottage on an island and to the weird, hostile man (Brian Cox) who lives there. And then the explanations start to pile up.
This is Naomi Watts’ first move since “Mulholland Drive” and I was going to complain that we essentially learn nothing about her character except that she’s a newspaper reporter–but then I remembered that in “Mulholland Drive” we essentially learned nothing except that she was a small-town girl in Hollywood, and by the end of the movie we weren’t even sure we had learned that. “Mulholland Drive,” however, evoked juicy emotions and dimensions that “The Ring” is lacking, and involved us in a puzzle that was intriguing instead of simply tedious.
There are a couple of moments when we think “The Ring” is going to end, and it doesn’t. One is that old reliable where the heroine, soaking wet and saved from death, says “I want to go home,” and the hero cushions her head on his shoulder. But no, there’s more. Another is when Aidan says, “You didn’t let her out, did you?” That would have been a nice ironic closer, but the movie spells out the entire backstory in merciless detail, until when we’re finally walking out of the theater, we’re almost ashamed to find ourselves wondering, hey, who was that on the phone?
Parents need to know that The Ring is a 2002 remake of a Japanese film that is very, very scary. Four people and a horse die on-screen, with the potential for many more untimely demises throughout. The soundtrack is filled with the spitting of unending Seattle rain, echoing orchestral strains of doom and loud and relentless guttural sound effects, all adding to the scariness. A dead girl’s face decomposes in a few seconds.
Water seeps out of nowhere. Handprints appear and then disappear just as mysteriously. Blood is seen in the water. Several people have spontaneous nosebleeds. A man kills himself using electric cords and an overflowing bath tub. A dead girl is found wearing an expression of horror. A woman tumbles down a deep well, where she discovers a girl’s dead body.
On television, in a grainy black-and-white video, a long-dead girl emerges from a well looking gray and menacing, then climbs out of the TV set and causes the frightening death of an innocent man. A woman throws a bag over her daughter’s head and tosses her down a well. Profanity includes “s–t,” “prick,” “bitch,” and “damn.”
The Ring (2002)
Directed by: Gore Verbinski
Starring: Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson, Brian Cox, David Dorfman, Daveigh Chase, Jane Alexander, Lindsay Frost, Amber Tamblyn, Rachael Bella, Shannon Cochran, Sasha Barrese
Screenplay by: Ehren Kruger
Production Design by: Tom Duffield
Cinematography by: Bojan Bazelli
Film Editing by. Craig Wood
Costume Design by: Julie Weiss
Set Decoration by: Rosemary Brandenburg
Art Direction by: Patrick M. Sullivan Jr.
Makeup Department: Rick Baker, Jean Ann Black
Music by: Hans Zimmer
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, disturbing images, language and some drug references.
Distributed by: DreamWorks Pictures
Release Date: October 28, 2002
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