A pretty good film, but...

Rating: Null/10 (14 March 2003)

I'm tempted to be as harsh as possible, on principle. This film cost $US45 million to make. The cost of striking, say, 3,000 subtitled prints of the original Japanese "Ringu", which had already been made and paid for, would have been, effectively, nothing, since distribution costs aren't included in that $45 million figure anyway. It would have made as much sense to have paid $45 million in salaries to the hundreds of people who served on the cast and crew making them shuffle around in aimless circles for three months.
I'm not saying this because "The Ring" happens to be a remake. There's nothing wrong with that. I don't think Francis Ford Coppola should have been deterred from making his 1992 "Dracula" by the existence of John Badham's 1979 "Dracula". Clearly, Coppola felt that he had his own approach to the material, and he was right. It was, admittedly, a stupid approach, and he bungled it even so, but you can't blame a man for trying. The 1979 "Dracula" was itself an nth-generation remake, and IT was an effectively different movie from ITS predecessors ... and in at least some cases, a better one.
But a mere four years separate the Nakata's "Ringu" from Verbinski's "The Ring" (less, if you count from when the original was released to when the remake commenced pre-production), which is hardly likely to be enough time to come up with a distinct viewpoint - and Verbinski seems to have one out of his way to avoid doing this. Even the locations seem to have been chosen so as to duplicate the original Japanese locations as precisely as possible; they've also been shot in almost exactly the same manner. When we get our first glimpse of Anna Morgan it came as a shock to me that she white, not Asian. What was I expecting? I don know, but I probably forgot, for the moment, which movie I was watching. (By the way, the fact that the villainess isn't Japanese is actually a problem. The thick veil of black hair that covers her face - this, too, Verbinski has slavishly copied - looks far more like the work of make-up artists trying too hard.)
Since it's been slavishly and competently copied from a brilliant original, there's no denying that "The Ring" is a good movie. Everything that worked in the original also works (to some degree) here; it probably also worked in the Korean remake, and if the film's ever made in Germany, it will probably work there, too. But a director who binds his fingers in this fashion and forces them to trace the outlines of someone else's work is highly unlikely to be able to command as much power. The most extreme example of this effect is Gus Van Sant's remake of "Psycho", scene-for-scene identical to a masterpiece yet bordering on being downright bad. And when Van Sant DID have the nerve to change something and strike his own path, the result was, to put it kindly, unmotivated; to put it more accurately, breathtakingly moronic. The same happens to a lesser degree here. Nakata's "Ringu" had an admirable simplicity. Verbinski, aware that he's contributing nothing of substance, can't help gilding the lily here and there, which does only mild harm, but cetainly no good. For example, there's too much STUFF on that cursed videotape. The heroine in this version has at least a dozen different premonitions of her impending demise - nosebleeds, horses, water, dreams, scars, coughed-up wires, ladders, blurred photographs - where two or three would have been more than enough. And the added digital effects serve no purpose other than to let us know that there are digital effects.
In this fashion Verbinski ruins Nakata's scariest scene.
Spoilers follow... The scariest scene in the original was the one in which the villainess crawled out of the well in the videotape... and then proceeded to crawl out of the television, and across the room, as well. This took place in a small, closed, sparsely furnished apartment, in the dark, and we saw it in a single, unblinking, front-on camera shot. Verbinski sets the sene in a a more open place with plenty of windows and he keeps CUTTING: showing Samara crawling out of the television from the front, then from the side (in the kind of effects shot designed to make the trickery of the special effects people look more imressive, at the expense of everything else), then from a long shot, all the while jumping back and forth between this and action taking place elsewhere.
I could forgive Verbinski these missteps on the grounds that he has, after all, made a decent, involving, atmospheric, and mildly terrifying film. But it really is the original all over again. The only difference is that it's not as good.