THE RING (2002) REVIEW

The Ring is much further of an operative story than a true horror film. Sure, I set up particular moments a little intimidating, but the utmost of the horror comes from the creepy atmosphere and a sense of dread that hangs over the entire movie.

When a youthful girl dies in the cold open after watching a mysterious VHS tape recording, her aunt, Rachel( Naomi Watts), investigates the legend of this deadly tape recording. She watches the videotape, receives a call telling her she has seven days to live, and also sets out to figure out what the hell is going on.

The Ring is as 2002 as you can get. Except for perhaps those skater shoes with the bus, nothing defined that time as important as this movie. It was one of a sprinkle of pictures imitated in Scary Movie 3, and the film demurred off a trend of American remakes of Japanese horror flicks. Part of the movie’s lasting heritage( is it lasting?) might have to do with the death of VHS only a couple of times after the film’s release. The movie’s plot hinges on a technology that now incontinently dates the movie. As this was released you had the rise of DVDs, and now indeed that technology( as well as Blu-Ray) feels relatively outdated. Everything is streaming these days, and The Ring makes VHS tape recording feel as aesthetically pleasing as a vinyl record or film photography.

The riddle central to the plot is appealing, but the more we learn about the videotape tape recording, the further the spell is broken. This is the case with numerous horror flicks. The lower we know the better, but The Ring is about someone trying to break this all down. Rachel’s interest in studying the tape recording is evocative of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up ( 1966) in which a shooter believes he may have mugged a murderer and ‘ blows up ’ the image to study the picture. He gapes at the image for so long that it seems to lose all meaning, at least to the bystander, but the character sees a commodity we don’t.

Rachel’s preoccupation with the published image is much more immediate considering she has a good idea the tape recording’s deadly curse is veritably real. The plot mechanics make her despair much more accessible and thus she becomes a little less intriguing, as if her characterization is only as extensive as the film’s limits let it be. The plot energizes this movie, indeed if Rachel’s conduct mandates the pace.

There’s a moment of emotional catharsis with about twenty twinkles left in the film, and I’d say it doesn’t really work because until that point we don’t have an important interest in Rachel or the dead girl behind the deadly curse. What hooks us in is the premise and the spectacle of a rotten cadaver crawling out of your television set. The intriguing angle then, the subtext I suppose, is that our boxes are killing us, the incarnation of a concern held by parents far and wide for their youthful children.

The Ring has all of this, but it takes its time and deals with a much more conventional operative story, one that could live in any number of stories but rather lays waste to much of this movie’s appeal. That being said, the final fifteen twinkles are great enough, but as it’s I felt like the middle forty or so twinkles were empty space. This is a kindly languorous story bookended by two thrilling sequences.

That operative story is fueled by Rachel’s preoccupation, and as I mentioned it glasses the preoccupation of the character in Blow-Up. But again, that character study works because we can’t really comprehend the shooter’s unforeseen seductiveness with the photos. He’s a tone-centered, egocentric dude who suddenly goes to great lengths to probe commodities that have nothing to do with him. The textual dramatic question is whether or not someone committed a murder, but underneath that, we wonder what drives the shooter tête-à-tête. The final moments of the film, involving a surreal tennis match, concentrate on what might be going on inside his mind.

The Ring might have an analogous angle were we to not understand Rachel’s provocations. rather her provocations are crystal clear and incredibly rote. The victim was her bastard, and her family asked her to look into this. That’s all she needs to go on. And yeah, perhaps that should be enough, but the film in no way works to establish any kind of meaningful connection between Rachel and her departed bastard. They just are to be related, but Rachel norway wastes any study on the dead girl.

The emotional crux of the film concerns Rachel’s solicitude for her son, Aidan( David Dorfman). Now, Aidan was the one who had a relationship with his kinsman, and he’s the most fascinating character in all of this. Indeed still, the film substantially wastes his character, using him more as the instantiation of doom rather than as a unique character.

Aidan predicts his kinsman’s death. Three days after her death, his schoolteacher shows Rachel the delineations he made. Considering she just failed, his demented delineations make a lot of sense, and Rachel shrugs this off to the schoolteacher, saying it’s all accessible. At the end of the scene, the schoolteacher will tell her that Aidan made these delineations the week before. After a moment of surprise, Rachel swells down the schoolteacher’s solicitude. Her swiftness to explain the sprat’s obviously fragile state of mind might be the most disturbing part of the film. She knows where it comes from, but she doesn’t feel to consider the real ramifications of the girl’s death on her 9 or so time-old son.