Flawed beyond belief

Rating: 1/10 (29 October 2006)

When I heard that Ringu was being made in Hollywood, I was appalled. When it came out and did well, I ignored it. I finally watched it last week and cannot believe it has done as well, both critically and financially. The acting is so wooden it's not funny, especially Naomi Watts. How reviews failed to point this out amazes me. I was led to believe that the film was a, practically, frame for frame remake of the original. The opening 15 minutes or so are nearly exactly the same and I began to be drawn in. But then the video comes into play and as each element in it is revealed in the storyline I got more and more frustrated. Some elements do survive the ordeal but some images cannot have been made by Samara (the scene of her mother's suicide for instance, the "burning tree" for instance etc etc). In fact the whole character of Samara makes no sense at all. Why was she put into the hospital? What had she done? What's with the pictures she "created"? Why did she get let out? Are her parents really her parents (showing a partial birth certificate for a second or two is only going to make me angrier!)? Why does her touch burn? It is an insult to my intelligence (and yours!)! There is no sense of doom, of urgency in any of the characters. There is no sense of geography. When 10 minutes of story would have, maybe, helped move the story along, we get 10 minutes of frantic action with no meaning. Why?! What Hideo Nakata did to Koji Suzuki's awesome novel was to take the important parts and overlay a supernatural story over the top. The Ring has taken the important parts out of Ringu and overlays a different supernatural story over the rest. The problem with The Ring is that the story they used is pathetically weak in comparison to that in Ringu. And if the US market is willing to accept it as "better" then that merely exposes the "quality" of contemporary US horror. I recommend that everyone read the book in addition to watching Ringu as a remedy to this disaster of a movie. Although it looks good and contains some shocks, it is too flawed to be a version of Ringu or a satisfying horror movie in its own right.