Verbinski's vision reigns supreme

Rating: Null/10 (16 September 2004)

When a novel like Koji Suzuki's 'Ringu' spawns films in Korea, Japan and Hollywood, it's rare to find the one made in Hollywood beats all that came before it. With The Ring, Verbinski has broken Hollywood's usual curse in this respect, and delivered a fine horror film.
Fanboys often claim Hideo Nakata's earlier Japanese film based on the Ringu novel is superior, and Verbinski's film is a shallow copy. Nothing could be further from the truth. While Nakata's film is faithful to the novel, the execution was flawed by several items in my opinion. First was a low budget which limited the scope and production values severely. The most annoying however was the suspension of disbelief required with respect to the psychic powers of the ex-husband. Although common in Japanese supernatural films, Western audiences find this plot device very hard to swallow. Nakata also attempted to explain too much of the back story of Sadako/Samara and ended up losing some of the impact of the story. While the back story may have worked in a novel, it doesn't work well in Nakata's film. Finally the ending scenes of Nakata's film were perhaps the weakest of the entire movie and robbed the film of impact.
I submit that Verbinski's The Ring is a superior interpretation of the original novel to the screen. Verbinski took the core elements of Ringu, transplanted it to Seattle with a much larger budget and a superior cast and overlaid a certain sense of style earlier interpretations lacked. Unlike Nakata, Verbinski deploys no deus ex machina plot devices and the key characters in the film are much more believable to Western audiences.
The result is definitely one of the most original horror films in the last ten years. 8/10