...without a doubt the best horror film of 2002.
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"Seven days..."
The Movie According to John:
I'm thinking, maybe any title that had "Ring" in it in 2002 was bound to be a success.
I went into "The Ring" with some slight trepidation. A half dozen of my film students had already seen it before I did, and they were evenly divided on its merits. Three of them thought it was scarier than heck, and the other three thought it was boring.
Then along came my DVDTown compatriot, Eddie Feng, on a trip to my place in California where we met for the first time, and I asked him if he wouldn't mind seeing the film again, considering how much he'd said he liked it the first time around. He was delighted, but it occurred to me I might be placing myself in an awkward situation. What if I didn't like the film? I hardly wanted my first visit with Eddie spoiled by a disagreement. I mean, it was like getting a Christmas gift from your Aunt Martha and being asked to open it in front of her. What do you say if you really hate it?
Fortunately, no such dilemma presented itself. I enjoyed the film quite a lot, if a little less and for slightly different reasons than Eddie. But first let me make one thing clear: "The Ring" came out at about the same time as another horror movie, "FearDotCom," which had a similar premise. "FearDotCom" was about a deadly Web site, "The Ring" about a deadly video tape. However, there the similarities stop. While "FearDotCom" was merely a crude, clumsy gore-fest, "The Ring" is an accomplished and stylish thriller.
Based on the big-screen Japanese hit movie, "Ringu," from 1998 and a series of Japanese television shows that Eddie will list below, the DreamWorks production of "The Ring" likely surpasses them all in technique and execution. You wouldn't know that from the first few minutes, though, since the film begins, teasingly, like almost every slasher movie in history, with two teenage girls alone in a house on a stormy night. They're telling each other ghost stories, and one says, "Have you heard about this video tape that kills you when you watch it?" And as soon as you watch it, she explains, "your phone rings and someone says, 'You will die in seven days.'" Then, before you die, you see "the ring." Well, one of the girls reveals that she has, indeed, watched such a tape the week before, and then the phone rings! We expect any moment a meat hook to come slashing out of the shadows or a carving knife to start severing body parts. But not to worry; nothing in this film is quite what you expect it to be.
In fact, for a traditional horror thriller, this film from director Gore Verbinski ("Mouse Hunt," "The Mexican") is decidedly untraditional. Unlike most such thrillers these days, "The Ring" depends mainly on sights, sounds, music, and imaginative lighting and camera work--zooms, pans, close-ups galore--to build and maintain suspense; on red herrings and mysterious characters and things that go bump in the night. There is very little actual blood or gore involved, yet there are a couple of good starts and a few images that may make you turn your head away.
The picture stars Naomi Watts in an overlooked Oscar-worthy performance, an oversight possibly the result of the film's not being deemed part of a serious enough genre to deserve consideration; I don't know. Anyway, she plays a mother, Rachel Keller, whose young son, Aidan (David Dorfman), is having premonitions about people's deaths. These people are subsequently found with their hearts stopped and horrible, ghastly expressions on their face. Clearly, they have died of fright, and Aidan may know something about it.
Rachel becomes involved when Aidan correctly predicts his cousin's death, and the victim's friends claim it was caused by a video tape. Rachel, an investigative news reporter, begins looking into the matter and finds related deaths, tracing them to a single night, the victims all viewing the same tape.
As much a detective-mystery thriller as a horror film, things get progressively more eerie as the movie goes on. Rachel gets hold of the tape and naturally, being inquisitive and unbelieving, she watches it. Too bad for her. The bizarre pictures on the tape appear to tell a story, and Rachel soon learns that she has only the allotted seven days to figure out what it means or...well, you guessed it. The plot plays out in those seven days, counted down one day at a time.
Rachel manages to enlist the aid of a friend, Noah (Martin Henderson), a video consultant who is understandably skeptical at first but eventually helps her in the investigation. Although there is a small but solid supporting cast involved, this is almost entirely Ms. Watts's movie, and beyond the introductory sequence she is in practically every scene. She is convincing all the way.
The movie is perfectly creepy in the best possible sense, director Verbinski taking his cue largely from Hitchcock and "Psycho." There's a creepy Bates-like motel in the country run by a creepy Norman Bates-like manager, plus a highly suggestive shower scene and even a climactic shot of a chair turning slowly around with a body in it. Moreover, Brian Cox (the original Hannibal Lecter in "Manhunter") is on hand as a creepy old guy with a creepy old farmhouse and an even creepier young daughter. That would be Samara (Daveigh Chase), of whom it is said, "She never sleeps."
It's hard to take your eyes off the screen for a second. Part of this is because the film and its characters are so fascinating to watch, and part of it is because if you do look away or blink twice, you're sure to miss some important plot device. Woe to thee who does.
I have to admit that I found the middle of the picture somewhat flat, and by the second half I thought the plot became a little too convoluted for its own good, throwing in one too many twists and turns and anticlimaxes. Yet, overall, "The Ring" has more than its fair share of unsettling images, chilling scenes, and disturbing junctures. And the movie's ambiguous ending has "sequel" written all over it. At least, I hope it does. Warts and all, "The Ring" is without a doubt the best horror film of 2002.
Video:
The folks at DreamWorks always manage to provide a crisp, clear picture on their DVDs, and "The Ring" is no exception. The presentation measures an ordinary 1.74:1 anamorphic widescreen ratio across a normal television, but the video quality is anything but ordinary. The colors are purposely done up in blue-gray metallic shades, and they are precisely limned. Dark areas may be a shade too black to reveal intense inner detail, but they produce sharp contrasts and reveal good depth. The various muted hues are not meant to be realistic but to create atmosphere, and the video reproduction renders them nicely, with a minimum of grain, halos, moiré effects, or other transfer artifacts.
Audio:
The audio choices offered are Dolby Digital 5.1, DTS 5.1, and Dolby 2.0 Stereo Surround. In DD 5.1 there is excellent front-channel sound, which, like the video, is crisp and clean. Dialogue is especially well rendered, with the front speakers producing a fairly wide stereo spread, excellent dynamics, and a strong, deep bass. There is not a huge amount of information fed to the back channels, but what there is comes through effectively, things like the ambiance of Hans Zimmer's relatively subdued but spooky musical soundtrack, ghostly creakings, and, naturally, rain. How did we ever enjoy rain before surround sound?
Extras:
There is only one major extra on the disc, a never-before-seen short film created exclusively for the video by the director of "The Ring." It's a fifteen-minute mini movie that uses new, alternate, and deleted material to create a different way of looking at the same subject matter. It's one of the few DVD bonus items in quite a while I can unconditionally recommend, and it conveys its own moments of tension. However, for your own good I have to warn you, DO NOT WATCH THIS MINI MOVIE. That is, not until you've watched the feature film.
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[release]10759[/release]