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THE
RING
 
PLOT
Rachel is investigating the sudden death of her cousin. She finds out
about a cursed videotape which her cousin and her friends supposedly
watched exactly seven days before she died. As she manages to track
down the tape, she now has to search for the truth in order to survive.
REVIEW
This unnecessary highbudget remake of the Japanese masterpiece Ringu
is great, but far from as good as the original. I hate the fact that
people are too lazy or too dumb to be able to read subtitles. And if
you can't read subtitles, you're probably too young to watch it anyway.
There are a few nice touches added in this remake but it also removes
a lot of great stuff from the original. For example: when people die
the don't have the scary screaming face in the remake. The Ring doesn't
focus on developing the story as well as the original did, instead it
focuses more on scaring the audience. Also, while the tape used in the
original was short, badly filmed, creepy and had a somewhat distorted
picture. This has a quite long tape which starts out nicely but then
turns into an acid trip and is also much to well directed. I would
also like to point out that it almost looks as if this was shot on the
exact same places as the original sometimes.
Now to the directing. It is clearly much better than the original. Gore
Verbinski uses a lot of interesting angles and you got to love the scene
where the sun shines through the tree, making it look almost as if it
was on fire. On the other hand, with forty million dollars more in the
budget, you would expect the directing to be better than the original
anyway, it is brilliant though. The acting is also top notch, and Naomi
Watts, playing Rachel, is great! I think we will be seeing a lot of her
in the future.
Even if I would have preferred seeing the original The Ring on the big
screen, I am still very pleased to be able to see the movie at all on
cinemas. I am actually happy that it became a such big surprise hit as
it did. Even though I was always quite sure that this would be a big
hit. Unfortunately, since this went so well on cinemas, there will
probably be a sequel, rumours has it that the sequel will be following
the story of Ring 0 more, which is too bad as I didn't really like
that movie a lot. Also, this movie cleared the way for a bunch of other
Asian horrormovie remakes, and that sucks. At least we get a US DVD
release for the original Ringu because of this. I think that many
people will rent the original by mistake, and probably hate it aswell
as you always like the first of the movies you saw. As it was for me
with Red Dragon, I thought Red Dragon was ok and decided to rent the
original Manhunter, and I hated it. I just hope that America for once
could get a bit of originality in themselves and not just produce
remakes. But I guess it all comes down to the money in the end.
GORE
This is actually "gorier" than the original I would have to say since
we actually do get to see some rotting people. But as you might have
figured out by yourself, this doesn't play on the gore level but instead
on the psychological and creepy level even if this remake doesn't
explain as much as the original did and you end up with being quite confused.
SOUNDTRACK
No change from the original here, the same awesome piano music, the same
creepy sounds, everything is the same. It's practically as if they just took
Ringu and replaced the actors with American.
BOTTOM LINE
I hate DreamWorks for making this movie as I don't think many people
realise that this is a remake and call it off as original. There are a
few nice touches added but some bad effects aswell. As the original felt
a bit more as a ghost story, this has no feeling of ghosts at all and
it isn't even that creepy for when I watched Ringu the other day again,
I was scared as hell, but this just doesn't do it for me. You get to feel
for the little girl in this and that makes it much less creepy. I say that
you should see the original before you see this but it's up to you, both
are really good movies, I just think that the original deserves all the credit.
Review
By: AnthroFred
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