A chilling and thrilling horror.

Rating: Null/10 (7 March 2004)

Coming from the Steven Spielberg stable Dreamworks, this surprisingly respectful remake of Ring is an excellent horror thriller in its own right. The Ring manages to pay respect to the original and use its ideas, but often chooses to interpret various scenes its own way.
To say it lives up to Nakata Hideo's near perfect original, would be a mistake, but The Ring is just about there. Starring Muholland Drive's Naomi Watts, written by Scream 3 scribe Ehren Kruger, and directed by Pirates of the Caribbean's Gore Verbinski, the signs weren't good. To top all of that off, they were making an unnecessary remake of an acclaimed masterpiece.
However, The Ring was the surprise success of 2002/03, due to a clever and dramatic advertising campaign (see left). The tagline `Before you die, you see' was a temptation to audiences and The Ring ended up as the scariest movie since the original. It made a star of Naomi Watts, and of director Gore Verbinski, and Scream 3 writer Ehren Kruger.
The plot focuses on the mystery of a nightmarish videotape which kills you one week after you watch it. Cynical journalist Rachel Keller (Watts) soon gets drawn into the mystery after her niece and 3 of her friends all die inexplicably on the same night, in different places. Soon, she finds the tape for herself and watches it, and then the phone rings. Later she enlists help from her ex-boyfriend, who also watches it. However, after her inexplicably paranormal son watches the tape also; she is drawn further into a bizarre mystery which somehow involves horses, a suicidal parent and a very deep well.
The Ring shows an intricate attention to every detail. The setting itself is filled with clues (for example ring shapes in the background), and every place is dripping with dread and atmosphere. The whole film has a dark blue-green tinted feel, which reflects the surreal video, and the stark contrasts in some scenes make the scene where big revelations happen seem more realistic. In fact all of Bojan Bazelli's dreamlike cinematography is a wonder to behold. Hans Zimmer's surreal, swelling score is beautiful and dramatic, but never intrusive. The on-screen countdown adds to the sense of urgency, and Ehren Kruger's (who wrote the distinctly average Scream 3) clever and inventive script adds emotion to a story which seemed bland originally due to the all too literal TartanAsia subtitles.

The Ring strives to work on as many levels as Ring did. The ghost story seemed much more in place in the Land of the Rising Sun, than the land of baseball and leaders with below par IQs. There is no longer a sense of unpredictable dislocation as the Japanese version had, and the less said about the reimagining of Nakata's frightening final scene, he better.
However where The Ring improves, is in the way that everything that is happening is more dramatic and exciting. The killer video is much more creepy and bizarre, and the struggle of Rachel is made more sympathetic as she leaves her comfortable Seattle home into a dislocated windswept village far away from help. The scene in the well is much scarier, and the opening possesses far more tension than Nakata's original. The Ring also leaves many questions unanswered, but enough actually answered to work as a stand alone horror movie. Whether The Ring can survive as a franchise remains to be seen (The Ring 2 is already in production) but as a horror on its own, it is creepy and imaginative enough in its own way, and remains almost as disturbing as the original.
Verdict: Far better than all the 21st century Hollywood horror movies put together, and a pretty tough rival to Nakata Hideo's original, The Ring is a frightening and memorable horror picture. ****