The Ring (Full Screen Edition)
by Gore Verbinski
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Actor: Brian Cox, David Dorfman, Jane Alexander, Martin Henderson, Naomi WattsDirector: Gore Verbinski
Brand: Paramount
Producer: Benita Allen
Producer: Christine Iso
Producer: Doug Davison
Producer: J.C. Spink
Writer: Ehren Kruger
Writer: Hiroshi Takahashi
Writer: Kôji Suzuki
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, Dubbed, DVD, Full Screen, Live, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 115 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-03-04
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Dreamworks Video
DVD Reviews of The Ring (Full Screen Edition)
DVD Review: ''Listen to Your Children''
Summary: 5 Stars
The Ring, DreamWorks' 2002 U.S. remake of Asmik ACE Entertainment's 1998 Japanese thriller, Ringu, based on author Koji Suzuki's bestselling novel, Ring ([1991], 2003), merits, without equivocation, its surprise-hit status.
Airing her hatred of television to high school compatriot Becca Kottler (Rachael Bella), The Ring opens in Katie Embry's (Amber Tamblyn) protected, upscale suburban Seattle home. Mulling the neurological effects of electromagnetic transmissions, she accuses big business of conspiring to keep the public in the dark. Becca asks Katie if she knows anything about the mysterious videotape that has surfaced at rival Revere High, its harrowing images purportedly invoking the horrid deaths of unmindful viewers "seven days" after receiving an eerie phone call from a whispering, young girl. Katie admits she and her Revere boyfriend, Josh, and another young couple, saw the macabre recording in place of the football game they planned to watch during their recent rendezvous at nearby Shelter Mountain Inn. Fulfilling the urban myth, Katie clutches her throat, feigning suffocation, which unhinges Becca. Moments later, at 10 PM, Katie IS dead! Curled-up in her closet with mouth agape, putrid and soaking wet, she resembles the tormented soul in Edvard Munch's infamous masterpiece, The Scream.
As a psychological thriller, The Ring plumbs the murky depths of psyches wracked by loss and broken relationships. Katie's untimely death devastates the Embry's and haunts their perceptive, six-year old-nephew, Aidan Keller (David Dorfman), who adored his older cousin. Unsatisfied with the official cause of death of heart failure, Ruth Embry (Lindsay Frost) asks her younger sister, Rachel (Naomi Watts), with whom Katie bonded, to investigate. Heading a single parent household after her separation from Noah Clay (Martin Henderson), Rachel Keller supports her son, Aidan, as a journalist with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. At Katie's wake, she discovers Josh died on the same night and time as Katie, apparently of suicide, allegedly jumping-off a high-rise building. At work, Rachel learns the pair's trysting cohorts perished on the same night and time, exactly one week after viewing the accursed videotape.
Aidan's disturbed drawings of frocked, young girls buried underground, floating underwater, and entombed in rocket ships has alarmed his teacher (Sandra Thigpen) who informs Rachel of the matter after the latter arrives late from work to pick up her son at school. Rachel shrugs-off his teacher's concern, resolving Aidan's sketches depict his deceased cousin, Katie. Determining the illustrations predate Katie's death by several days, Aidan's teacher intimates he may be communicating something else. The innuendo infuriates Rachel, but raises her consciousness as well.
At its core, The Ring revolves around the murder of a paranormally gifted child, Samara Morgan (Daveigh Chase), a ghostly sprite in the Dickensian tradition, left for dead in a well, eternally doomed to a watery purgatory. Subjected to failed adoptions and heartless institutionalization, Samara is everyone's child whose life is tragically cut short, abandoned, abused, neglected, and denied of loving natural and adoptive parents--especially caring mothers. In death, Samara seeks to return in resonate surrogates, finding them in Aidan and his journalist mom. Samara has a story to tell. She voices it subconsciously in dreams and subliminally with nensha (thoughtography), enabling her to telepathically "burn" ethereal images of herself and her impressions into mind and media, such as videotape, and telekinetically manipulate matter. If Samara haunts those who, in complacency, blindly turn away from her, or callously trivialize her plight, then those who are unable or unwilling to fathom her videotape will, after a week, summon her corrupt Cabalistic twin, a virulent, festering, demon who effortlessly conjures death by encircling its victims in an otherworldly tsunami. Rachel, who is consumed with saving her son's life, as an unintended viewer of the videotape, more than her own life, or that of her estranged partner, Noah, whose support she sought as a media expert, emerges from Samara's philosopher's stone well as a sentient sentinel.
Not since Alfred Hitchcock's inspirational adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier's The Birds (1963) has a film so influentially ascribed the esoteric role of consciousness-raising to a spiritually enlightened, capable female lead character, separating it from dronish portrayals in more banal slasher-hacker features. Like Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), Rachel Keller is a harbinger of change, encountering, at best, reticence in an asylum confined Becca, and self-absorption in the Morgan's family physician, Dr. Grasnik (Jane Alexander), who is oblivious to Samara's fate. At worst, Rachel faces overt hostility in Samara's morose and physically abusive, adoptive father, Richard Morgan (Brian Cox). Thanks to producers, Laurie MacDonald and Walter F. Parkes, screenwriters, Hiroshi Takahashi and Ehren Kruger, and director, Gore Verbinski for advancing the Master's torch; to Hans Zimmer for his memorable, haunting score; and, finally, to Naomi Watts, who follows her breakthrough performance in Mulholland Drive in breathtaking fashion as a distraught mother and tenacious seeker of truth, making us believers.
With each passing day, Samara broadcasts more powerful, revelatory hallucinations of significant persons, places, and events, such as her ill-fated, adoptive mother, Anna Morgan's mental decline, and failed horse breeding business and equestrian competitions, as well as enigmatic symbols such as falling ladders, spinning chairs, and severed, wriggling fingers--beckoning her victims ever-closer to her abysmal black hole, like a ticking time bomb.
In the end, this potent, metaphysical cocktail of a film imbibes us with a morally perplexing, catch-22 twist: If faced with our own impending deaths, and that of our loved ones, including our children, and given only one chance to save everyone, would we take it? Rachel can do this by copying and proliferating Samara's wretched videotape. Doing so, however, condemns others to the same destiny. Altruistically, Rachel can sacrifice herself, Noah, and Aidan, ensuring the continuation of humanity. What if there are other videotapes in circulation unbeknownst to us?
As a child authority and high school teacher, author Koji Suzuki characterizes young people with intelligence, insight, and self-reliance---near equivalents of their adult counterparts, which we should welcome. Concomitantly, he warns us that our children are fragile and vulnerable beings, which should disarm us.
Description of The Ring (Full Screen Edition)
An inquisitive reporter views a mysterious videotape that is linked to several deaths she sets in motion a chain of events that puts her life in danger. Now she is in a race against time to solve the mystery before its too late. Studio: Paramount Home Video Release Date: 05/01/2007 Starring: Naomi Watts Brian Cox Run time: 115 minutes Rating: Pg13 Director: Gore VerbinskiDisturbing images and a few good shocks don't stop The Ring from being a hash of half-baked ideas. It's the kind of frightfest you'll watch to set a chilling mood or spook your susceptible friends, but when you try to sort it out, this well-mounted American remake (of the 1998 Japanese hit Ringu, based on Koji Suzuki's popular novel) collapses into a heap of incoherent parts. The negligible plot follows a Seattle reporter (Naomi Watts) as she investigates the death of her niece, the victim of a mysterious videotape that, according to vague urban legend, causes the viewer's death seven days later. (Fear Dot Com borrowed the same idea while avoiding this film's lofty pretensions.) The reporter, her son, and her estranged boyfriend view the tape, and the film's countdown structure follows them into deepening layers of terror--all quite effective until the movie attempts to explain itself. At that you're better off shutting down your brain and letting the creepy visuals take over. --Jeff Shannon
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