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| Tuesday, March 22, 2005 09:17 PM |
| That Old Familiar Ring |
 by Fëanor |
On Sunday I had some time to myself, and I realized I hadn't seen a movie in a while, so I headed out to the theater and checked out The Ring 2. I'd heard only shortly before that the film was directed by Hideo Nakata, the fella who directed the original Japanese Ringu that was so excellent, so I had high hopes.
Sadly, they were to be dashed. R2 is pretty dumb. It's at times laughable, at times frustrating, and it's very occasionally a bit interesting, but it is never very scary.
Maybe this is because the characters aren't particularly easy to like or relate to, and that they never feel very real to us. R2 pretty much starts out being weird, with its main characters and its audience already aware of the horrors that await them. Rachel and Aidan try to pretend that things are normal again, but they don't quite manage it. Aidan is already a creepy little kid even before he gets possessed (uh, I guess that was a spoiler, but I think it's in most plot summaries of the movie, so...sue me), and Rachel is already shaky and afraid even before anything happens. And before we've even seen those characters again, the tape and its curse have already returned into their lives.
Part of what made the original film so interesting is that the horror in it proceeded according to a set of rules which we knew from the beginning were to work themselves out in a week. The whole film was charged with this sense of desperate tension as the characters rushed to discover the meaning of the mystery before time ran out. When the complete rules by which the horror works are finally revealed in all their brutal logic, it is a chilling revelation indeed.
But R2 pretty much decides to throw those rules aside and come up with new ones that make much less sense, and that seem to be assembled haphazardly as the movie goes along. The movie is thus lacking any of the tension or deeply meaningful structure of the original.
It's also not very scary. One particular scene that was a complete failure for me personally, and also apparently for the audience with which I saw the film, was the one in which Rachel and her son are attacked by deer. First of all, there's never any explanation given for what occurs. The only connection there seems to be between Samara and deer is that there were a lot of deer antlers at the house where she lived with her adopted parents. Did her father hunt them, and now they want some kind of revenge? Have they sensed her evil and are attacking her out of some kind of animal rage? Who knows.
Even without an explanation, the scene could have perhaps come off as frightening if it had been shot and executed well. Sadly, it is not. The deer are obvious computer-generated fakes, and fail to be threatening in any way. I was aware, distantly, that it would in fact be dangerous to have your car rammed by a bunch of full-grown deer, but I kind of forgot about that as the audience and I laughed at the ridiculously unrealistic animals we were supposed to be afraid of.
What's even worse, the attack ends as suddenly and inexplicably as it began, and the deer (who have by this time swarmed around the car as if to recall the final scene of The Birds) just stand there and let Rachel and her son drive away.
One of the only interesting and clever things about the film is the casting of Carrie herself, Sissy Spacek, as Samara's actual mother, Evelyn. I got a real kick out of that. But again, Nakata fumbles what could have been a great scene and doesn't do anything interesting with Spacek or her character. The mystery surrounding Samara, her birth, and why she is the way she is, remains, perhaps for a third Ring film to sort out. Hopefully it won't be anything like the third Japanese Ring film, the atrocious Ring 0.
I'm not sure how Nakata went so wrong here. Was he overwhelmed by the challenges of making his first American, Hollywood film? I know he can make good movies. For instance, he made a fantastic film just a few years ago called Dark Water, which even had a rather similar storyline to this one (spoilers ahead), involving the ghost of a little girl endangering the life of a living child in her quest to find a mother, and the mother willing to give herself to that ghost to save her own child, thus depriving her child of a mother, and perhaps perpetuating a sad cycle of lost children.
Come to think of it, Nakata's rather obsessed with horror stories about lost children. Let's hope his next one will be better.
Btw, I am horrified to see an American remake of The Eye listed amongst Nakata's upcoming projects on the IMDB. Then again, who knows, maybe he'll be able to fix that piece of garbage. It would be refreshing to see an American remake of a foreign film that's actually better than the original. |
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