Not terrible, but the original was much scarier...

Rating: Null/10 (27 October 2002)

WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD
Well, after putting it off all week I finally got around to seeing the RING and I must say, they did far better than I thought, but still managed to make the film laughably mediocre compared to the original. First off, the lineage and many of the characters most interesting quirks were dropped in the American version in favor of dumbing down for the typically less attentive american audiences, but they sure never had a problem dropping all the artsy bulls**t which was totally and unbelievably unnecessary instead of building pain, dread and suffering. I swear to god, the continual showing of the tree was about to drive me mad! The film had no issues with showing alot of Arthouse CGI crap, nor did it have problems using loud noises to illicit a response from the crowd... things that in many ways hurt it in my eyes. You see, the original Hideo Nakata Ring had so much dread and a foreboding sense of doom by the end you almost felt like crawling in a well yourself, but this version seems to come and go in how it approaches the subject. Naomi Watts sense of death crawling to her seems almost lost in many scenes, much as if she turns it off and on by command, or quite frankly didn't care. Brian Cox's character also suffers much in the American version because unlike his counterpart in the Nippon version you never really get an idea of just why Samara/Sadako is such a monster and why she had to be dealt with... he was truly disturbed and hiding demons, the DreamWorks version makes him too vague to matter and its a shame. Noah is by far the most ruined character of all, and is totally stripped of all his psychic ability and made a non factor and totally uninteresting, whereas Ryuji was mysterious and played an important part. Thankfully Daveigh Chase does a wonderful job recreating Sadako for the American audience, she is far and away one of the films true saving graces. Onto the production. Not too bad, but more emphsis was placed on how the people and film looked than the content. The cursed videotape itself was a joke as well compared to the original, as it looked like a second rate MTV video some Mallcore band would produce. The original had almost a `snuff' quality and captured all the rage and mysterious hatred Sadako had for humanity and due to its low production and dark feel was very, very creepy unlike the glossy, overproduced and sorely overdone DreamWorks one. Perhaps DreamWorks felt the audience was too dumb to understand it, afterall it was laid out like connect the dots and was so pronounced that it lost all the effectiveness of its Asian counterpart. I did however like the ending better than the `Sarah Conner' ending of the original, but even so it did little to make up for the mishmash that occurred to get you to that point. Samaras inevitable (and greatly looked forward to by me) emergence was also very nice, as was the added addition of her room and the horse going mad. The film also seemed to borrow lightly from another Nakata film, the magnificent Dark Water which is not a bad thing, but just another shot at the lack of originality in American filmmaking and how instead of real minds like Nakata giving us real horror we get stuck with second rate trash like Scream and pretty much anything Wes Craven produces. All in all I give it a 5.5 out of 10, if you can seek out the original as it is far superior in almost every way. Hopefully though, the outright theft of great ideas from Japan like this will light a fire under what is a pathetic and dead genre in the US, and maybe move us towards films that care more about fright than selling merchandise or hocking the latest Compilation album of Eminem and Slipnot...