The Ring (Blog 3)

Gore Verbinski’s The Ring came out in 2002. It was his remake of Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998). Both films are based on a novel called Ringu by Koji Suzuki. Nakata's film leaves quite a bit more to the imagination than does Verbinski's remake. Although Verbinski stuck pretty close to the original source material, there are some differences, some obvious and some subtle.

The premise is as follows: Both films open to two teenage girls joking about a sleepover that one had gone to at a hotel in the mountains, where the teens watched a video they borrowed from the front desk. The Japanese version and the American version of this video are quite different.

The American version (preview Above) is quite a bit longer and more graphic. Both however, serve the same purpose; to give the viewer clues. After explaining the events at the hotel to her friend, the phone rings and...... you guessed it, death is upon her! Her friend is committed to a mental hospital and it is revealed that the dead girl's friends from the hotel have all perished as well.

From here the story follows the dead girl's aunt, played by Naomi Watts, trying to get to the bottom of her nieces death. While at the funeral Watts's character Rachel gets the scoop from her niece's friends by joining them for a smoke and admitting to "getting Hi" when she was their age. This is far different from the Japanese film where the same character simply gets the skinny from the kids without being in their circle.This difference, I suspect is due to the cultural differences of Japanese and American youth and their relationships with adults.

While at the funeral, Rachel's son goes to the dead girl's room after seeing a ghost. In the Japanese version the same things happen but the ghost is only present in the viewers

imagination. This scene and the differences in the death video (preview above) can be explained by the difference in attention span of the given audience. I suspect what is subtle and implied in the Japanese film is obvious and laid out in the American version because in America we have become a lazy audience. Few big Hollywood films leave anything to the viewers imagination, fearing we will get bored too easily.

The story continues with Rachel teaming up with ex boyfriend Noha (Martin Henderson) for

whom she makes a copy of the tape and together they seek the answers to the questions found on the tape. Time is of course not on their side, because by now both have seen the video and are given only days to live. As the film creeps toward the end many of the differences between the Japanese film and the American one become obvious. The Japanese film weighs mostly on the mystery and solving it. The American film also does this but with much more inclusion of in-your-face fright. In this way I think it (American version) looses a bit of scared by mystery and gains scared by gore. It seems quite common when comparing Japanese and American films to see this big difference but it becomes paramount in this genera.