Stands on its own.

Rating: Null/10 (14 January 2003)

I would have scored this movie higher, but since it is a remake of the japanese film Ringu (http://www.imdb.com/Title?0178868) it loses a lot of points. Let me get into details:
Firstly, the plot. It is very interesting and it immerses you into the movie - I thought it was a quite clever trick, but since this is a remake, the trick is not clever any more. I have not seen the remake by itself, but I think the film does leave a lot of unanswered questions, that if they had been answered they would remove nothing from the film's atmosphere and they would have helped the audience understand something more about the relationships between the various people that only appear shortly. It is good to keep the parents and the daughter mysterious, but the few cryptic sentences they utter do not explain anything nor do they give them much character. I think the best approach would have been to have one of the locals that is already giving away some information to explain a bit more.

I have not seen the original, but perhaps a nice idea would be for the actors to already have known that circulating the tape to two other people (or copying it, or whatever) would save their own lives. This would force them to make, erm... interesting choices.
But the best part of the film has to be the cinematography. It is amazing, the scenes are beautiful, breathtaking and the video itself is disturbing enough to be believable.
In general the film is well-paced; the acting is believable, the characterization does not exactly fit; part of the plot that should be explained is not, there are some inconsistencies regarding the first and last victims of the 'horror'; the music is OK; some SFX are overused, but the sound is crisp and clean; there are some very well done, quite disturbing scenes; and maybe you should watch the original instead, unless you generally prefer hollywood-ized versions.