The Ring (2002) September 16, 2006
Posted by gproject in : Recently Viewed , trackbackDirected by: Gore Verbinski
Gore Verbinski is certainly not genre-biased when it comes to directing. In between making the first two action/adventure Pirates of the Caribbean movies he slipped in a comedy drama in the form of The Weather Man. But even before all that he’d already made the family feature Mouse Hunt, and crime comedy The Mexican. Both had relative success and afforded him the opportunity to take on his most ambitious project to date: a remake of the Japanese horror/thriller Ringu. Better known as The Ring.
There is a video tape, so the legend goes, that kills you seven days after you watch it. But is it a legend? Could it be real? That’s the mystery cynical journalist Rachel Keller (Niomi Watts) becomes wrapped up in after her niece dies in mysterious circumstances. She herself watches the tape, which forces her on a quest to discover the truth about its origin within a week, or die a frightening death. As her sleuthing begins to uncover the dark secrets of an island family, she becomes immersed in the images on the tape and the life of a little girl called Samara.
A strange premise indeed, but an interesting one. Using urban legend as a basis for horror movies is certainly no new thing, but so often the stories of ‘a killer in the woods’ fall flat because of their implausibility. Where The Ring works most effectively is in having a simple premise that you can believe. There’s no bunch of teenagers breaking down on a long road and experiencing weird things, no mask-wearing murderers or bizarre townsfolk. It’s just a tape, and a ghost story.
Gorb Verbinski translates his skills over to the horror genre with comfortable ease, although this isn’t really an all-out horror movie. The focus is on the mystery element, with the only traditional horror scenes falling at the beginning, and towards the end of the picture. The entire mid-section revolves around finding the clues which lead Rachel to the origin of the tape, almost like a detective story. Naomi Watts carries the movie nicely, bringing depth to her character and not turning it into a horror-cliché (I think she only has to scream once). Shortcomings include a script which sometimes falls down trying to be mysterious and just coming off as confusing (“don’t you understand, she never sleeps”), and a bumpy ending that almost renders her entire search pointless.
It’s easy to see why this did well, and went on to have a storming DVD release too. A PG-13 horror movie could so easily have turned into a complete joke, but there’s enough psychological fear implanted into the story to render violence or gore unnecessary. So while the mystery plotline stops this from being an out-and-out fright-fest, it still had plenty of people unplugging their TVs at night.
Comments»
no comments yet - be the first?