The Ring (2003)
Posted on August 9, 2005
Filed Under Ghosts, Remakes, Series
The story goes that two Dreamworks execs sat down to watch Hideo Nakata’s Ring quite early in the morning, and they were so impressed by what they saw that by lunchtime they had managed to secure the rights to remake it. Amazingly, for a big-budget Hollywood remake of an independent, low-budget Japanese film, a lot of that passion and excitement for the original actually shows through in the finished product. The Ring, as we are meant to call it now, occasionally misfires, and is inevitably victim to a certain level of major-studio cackhandedness, but on the whole it does an admirable job of bringing the story to a wider audience.
Inevitably, more people are going to see this remake than Nakata’s original, but thankfully director Gore Verbinski represents him well. Snowblood Apple has a nice comparison of the two versions of the film, and it’s evident that Verbinski really did his homework in capturing Nakata’s visual style. He’s not stupid enough to try and clone it completely, but clearly he recognised that the careful framing of each shot was crucial to the first movie’s atmosphere, and tried to achieve something similar. As such, The Ring is almost as creepy as Ring, which is no mean feat. Naomi Watts gives a great performance as Rachel, the Asakawa substitute, strong where it counts but convincingly terrified when the script calls for it. Many of The Ring’s departures from the original actually work, giving the film its own mythology that never once feels pointlessly tacked on; the horses, for example, are a great touch, and perhaps the most daring departure - the portrayal of Samara / Sadako as a frightened young girl - works brilliantly, thanks in part to Daveigh Chase’s subtle portrayal. It’s refreshing to see a remake take an intelligent second look at the original story, rather than taking a grab-bag of the bits everyone remembers and padding the rest.
Not all of it works. Having gone to great lengths to mimic Nakata’s composition, Verbinski nearly undoes all his good work by swathing the whole thing in aquatic blue filters that feel like a lowest common denominator way of pointing up the spooky bits. The deadly videotape is rather too overtly stylised to give it any real impact - as Noah says, it’s “very student video”, lacking the ‘authenticity’ of the original’s multi-generational static and fuzz. Probably the weakest link is David Dorffman’s frankly horrible performance as Rachel’s son; in fairness to him, his dialogue and characterisation is incredibly weak, turning his character into a cliched, Sixth Sense-esque ’spooky kid with mental powers’, but there’s only so much of the kid’s middle-distance staring and deliberate pronunciation you can take. Unfortunately, the US follow-up pushed him even more to centre stage.
Amazingly, they also managed to botch Samara’s iconic final attack on Noah (one of the aforementioned “bits everyone remembers”). It just proves you can do too much with special effects; and whilst her flickery, two-dimensional appearance in Noah’s room ties in with the whole videotape concept, it also feels totally unreal and lacks the same punch as a real woman lurching out of the telly. Poor show.
These reservations aside, The Ring honours its heritage in fine style, and it does an extremely good job of translating the original’s appeal for an audience too lazy to read subtitles. Obviously, the Japanese film is better, and is a little more taxing on the grey matter, but Verbinski can hold his head high. Suprisingly (and ironically), this film is also significantly better than Nakata’s own US follow up, Ring Two.
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