🟨 The Ring (2002) Review - MADE IN THE U.S.A. | Film Waffle

The Ring (2002) directed by Gore Verbinski

Growing up in the early 2000s, I don't think there was a horror movie more impactful than The Ring. Sure, you heard a lot about James Wan's Saw. Maybe Mr. Shyamalan's Signs. But The Ring was the one all the cool kids in school were talking about.

This adaptation brought the Japanese franchise to the American public and, as Wikipedia kindly points out, set off a chain of American remakes of Japanese horror cinema. The Grudge is perhaps the most successful of these Johnny-come-latelies. Not sure if anyone remembers much about the others. I sure don't.

Trends come. Trends go. That was the thing in those days.

But that's a topic for another post. Here we are examining the OG!

And by "OG" I meant the original American remake. Not the 1998 Japanese film. And not the 1991 book by the late Koji Suzuki either. I've already reviewed those. Both were excellent. So then, the question becomes how well the Anglos here in the States adapted this modern horror classic.

The answer? Not great.

Quick Summary

Rachel Keller is a single mother and reporter who lives in a Seattle apartment with her son, Aidan Keller. After Rachel's niece mysteriously dies, she is asked to investigate. During the course of her investigation, she learns of a cursed videotape that supposedly kills anyone who watches it in seven days.

After retracing her niece's footsteps, she calls upon her ex-husband Noah Clay. Noah is a salty Blockbuster manager who thinks that Netflix and Redbox are a passing fad. Also he wears flip-flops indoors. Disgusting. In any case, the two team up to solve the mystery of the cursed videotape and who, or what, is behind it.

Story & Characters

This movie is a lot worse than I remember it being, and I took a lot of notes on this one, so please bear with me.

We begin just the same as the Japanese film. Two schoolgirls are sitting around at home being bored. One of them suddenly mentions they saw the famous cursed film. You know, the one that makes people die in seven days? And they saw it seven days ago tonight! DUN DUN DUN!

Already I'm disinterested. I don't know what it is about the acting, but it feels bland. Like a cheap parody. A knock off. Which I guess is what it is. A very expensive, multi-million dollar knock off.

Maybe it's the nasty bare feet on display in the frame above. Maybe it's the comically stupid look on her friend's face. Maybe it's the fact that the line delivery sounds like it belongs in an episode of Degrassi: The Next Generation or Gilmore Girls. Or worse. One Tree Hill.

Yikes.

I guess this is what they were going for. The American audience loves hammy, non-subtle, in-your-face cinema. I mean, I don't. But what the hell do I know?

Also, and I didn't bring this up in my review of the other franchise entries, but how did the teens know that they'd die after a week? Nothing in any of the cursed tapes suggests people will die. And, as far as we know, the teens are the first ones to watch the tape.

It seems like a strange conclusion to reach, yeah? Let's imagine that I was at a resort and popped in an unmarked home movie by the last occupant. Afterward the phone rings and a broad on the other end whispers "Seven days..."

Bitch. Seven days until what? Until my dry cleaning is done? Until nuclear war? Until my colon empties? Girl you need to be more descriptive and less cryptic if you want me to help you.

The movie has some decent ideas, but it often tries too hard to be scary. Thus the result ends up being stupid or cringe.

The cursed tape is a lot of random imagery and corny shock value. Falling ladders and swirling chairs. Lots of spooky-woo. Grubby insects. The whole nine yards.

Picking the fly off the screen was an interesting novelty. The nosebleed was too much. 

Especially when the nosebleed doesn't relate to anything we know about the tape. But, hey, spontaneous nosebleeds are spooky, so chuck it in.

That, along with the horses committing seppuku. And people scratching out faces in photos. And other people scribbling spirals. And the weird hyper-supernatural shit happening everywhere. Goddamn, it is so. Not. Subtle.

Naomi Watts as Rachel was fine. She wasn't selling me on being a single mother, but she had the best performance in the film. Instead she was selling me on the pushy working girl. Comparing her personality to Reiko in Ring is like comparing night and day.

I like how she just slaps down her Amex Green card at the resort.

She be out here like, "I own the damn place." I got a good laugh out of that.

Conversely, I was not a fan of Martin Henderson's performance as Noah. The man's a Kiwi, and you can tell he's really struggling with his American accent. Despite Naomi being British, she is much better at it.

Also, why are both of the leads non-Americans? So much for an American adaptation. The thing's been colonized by Commonwealthers!

More than that, though, I simply don't like Noah's character.

Real men don't use umbrellas.

The health records sequence with Noah is straight awful. It's a lame excuse to have stealth action-hero BS. What kind of tone are we going for? SO stupid and cringe. Noah gets a solid thumbs down from me. 

I also note that Noah and Rachel's romance is rekindled much more overtly in the adaptation as opposed to the source material. Again, the lack of subtlety feels like a collective dumbing down of a great story.

Aidan, the kid, is that made manifest. Rather than being a stock character whose child eyes give him a sixth sense, Aidan receives constant visions from the antagonist. Visions that he communicates in insufferably vague and annoying ways.

I don't know if the screenwriters thought they were making the little shit into a Damien Thorn rip-off or what, but it was not working. Aidan doesn't come across as some mystical indigo child. He comes across a walking, talking plot device to push the story forward when the writers don't know what to do.

Also he calls his mother by her first name. Gave me Up flashbacks.

"You call your own mother by her first name?"

Apparently the dude that played Aidan is now a lawyer working in Congress. So... good for him? Guess all that random omniscience this movie gave him paid off.

I never saw these three idiot main characters as a family. However, Aidan does redeem himself with the middle fingers he gives his parents.

Rachel: "Should we read something?" 

Aidan: "I'm kinda tired." 

LOL. Get rekt.

Noah: "You wish I was around more?" 

Aidan: "No." 

ROFL. Get fucked man. This little shit is out here taking names. You can't be doing your own family like that!

Circling back a bit to unnecessary scenes, did we really need to see the crappy early 2000s web searching? 

The runtime is already painfully long. Why the hell did you all think we needed to see someone do a research montage? Cursor crawling across the screen at a glacial pace like I'm at my library job, backseating someone who's never used a mouse before. The Japanese film didn't need to do that to get the point across. 

They did use a real local paper, the Seattle-PI, which is cool. 

There's a neat web archive of the paper in early 2002 with the same logo: https://web.archive.org/web/20020326085854/http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/.

And here they are today: https://www.seattlepi.com/. 

Pretty cool right? I really admire them doing stuff like that and... Oh. They use AI to "enhance" their journalism. Yay...

Also it looks like they mostly repost stuff from the AP now. The latest stories within their headline topics are from years ago. 

So much for that.

Back to the film's handholding, I don't like how they can't even trust the audience to understand what is going on in the research montage. They force poor Rachel to whisper bullshit like "What happened to you Anna?" Like, thank you. Yes. I have eyes and ears. I don't need the annoying narration. 

To be fair, Noah does the same thing when he narrates in the hospital record sequence. "Are you in here Anna?" Dude, shut up. It's like verbal signposting for people that have TikTok attention spans. And given this came out before the explosion of social media, there's no excuse.

Well I think that's as far as I can go without massive spoilers, so if you haven't watched the film, go ahead and skip to the next header. If you care, that is.

I hate Aidan's stupid excuse for watching the tape. "I couldn't sleep." 

Fuck off, dude. You know that Sadako Samara is evil. You know that your cousin watched the tape and died from it. Fuck off with that excuse. This is stupid, contrived drama that makes no sense.

.

Also it would have been helpful for Rachel and Noah to know that saving the bitch from the well is a bad thing. Funny that Aidan left that out amidst his vague childish omens about horses and barns and shit.

Interesting that they added the interview with the surviving schoolgirl from the intro. I think the Japanese version saved that for Ring 2. The schoolgirl apparently knows Rachel watched the tape. How? Fuck knows. It's spooky, so we're adding it. 

The girl says Rachel has four days left. Smells like fake news considering Rachel already made a copy of the tape and showed it to someone else by this time in the movie. So she should be safe, yes? Plot hole alert. 

Again. The movie is doing this because it's creepy, not because it makes sense within the narrative.

Rachel rewatches the cursed tape after she makes a copy. So... is she cursed again? Is it like a Double Jeopardy thing where you can't be cursed with the same video twice? That sounds a little inefficient. Get lawyer Aidan in here! Maybe he can give us a definitive answer. Not sure if I trust evil Samara's sinister plans. How does she plan on taking over the world with a curse so lenient? 

One thing I liked in this film over the Japanese version was that it dives into Western sensibilities. We Westerners are emotional wets, don't you know? Massive savior complexes. Bleeding heart Rachel cannot see Samara as anything other than an innocent victim. Misunderstood.

"She just wanted to be heard."

But, no. Samara is not a misunderstood child. She is a genuinely evil force. It makes the inversion of the trope all the more potent.

I also like the backstory of Anna Morgan, Samara's adopted mother. I like how this was explored through the island's doctor, and how the Morgans' inability to conceive led them to adopt this strange child from fuck knows where. It adds an eerie layer that I really enjoyed! Like, where in the hell did this child come from? Maybe she's the real Damien Thorn reborn?

This backstory is made more powerful when considering who tossed the girl down the well. It being the mother added a heartbreaking layer to the story that is absent in earlier adaptations.

So kudos on those fronts.

Mechanics & Structure

We got the Twilight blue filters, ladies and gents. 

What is it with movies set in Washington? Is there a state law up there that mandates this? "Every movie filmed here must use an unnecessary blue filter for the first installment of a series."

Clearly, it was not just the writers who were trying too hard to be all spooky. 

It's doubly odd when you consider that the protagonists are on a clock. They've only got seven days to get shit done. So why is the ability to distinguish time robbed from the viewer by washing every scene in blue? Maybe this is an intentional choice to make the days seem to blur together? Probably not. More likely the reasoning was "Blue-green is the color of water and the ocean and that's the setting so bleh."

I do enjoy how the film shoots the environments, though. As shown in the shots above, they evoke a lonely feeling. A lost feeling. I like that. Ring took a more claustrophobic route with tight spaces, but The Ring seems to do the opposite. And yet, they both trigger a sense of unease within me. Well done with that. Should've hammered that shit home rather than doing cheap shot-for-shot remakes of scenes.

One funny thing I noticed was the Anna Morgan photo.

Hmm. I wonder which person the audience needs to look at? Assuming you can see anything amidst the Tamagotchi green, that is.

It's visual handholding, of course. But I don't mind this so much. It reminded me of how old cartoons shaded moving objects differently from the background, so you could predict what was going to happen. 

Another thing. During the climax, why does the antagonist's face look like that? Seriously. Did we need to see that? Makeup, wtf was going on there? Felt so goofy. 

The music and sfx are there. In fact, there's quite a bit of music. And it's all right. I think... I remember there being a lot, but I can't remember what any of it sounded like, so take that for what you will.

Conclusion

Damn. These movie waffles of mine keep getting longer and longer. We're up past 2k words this time. Christ Almighty. And a mandatory apology again for this being a day late. I've been exhausted by work, and I had a lot to say!

I feel like I've been pretty harsh on The Ring in this review, and I don't mean to be. In fact, it is a perfectly serviceable horror flick. Arguably among the better high-budget horror movies to come out of Hollywood. But that doesn't mean it's good.

The Ring had the advantage of possessing a solid, inherited foundation. It took strides to differentiate itself. Some experiments improved the story, but most made the film inherently worse. And that's the problem, isn't it? Why would I watch The Ring when the original Japanese Ring is sitting right there with a tighter story and better characters?

So, in the end, The Ring was a massive downgrade. It is a decent film when taken alone. When I watched it, however, I could only think of how much better the original 1998 film did it.

🟨 Rating: 5/10