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'Ring 2' follows trend
By John Behling
Published:
Thursday, March 24, 2005
The best horror film I've seen this year is either Chan-Wook Park's "Cut" or Alexandre Aja's "Haute Tension."
While it's not surprising that both of these films are foreign ("Cut" is Korean, "Haute Tension" is French), it may be surprising to some that neither is Japanese.
With "The Ring 2," Hideo Nakata's remake of his 1999 sequel to his 1998 film, which was a remake of a 1995 made-for-television film by a different director, it's evident that J-horror is only deemed acceptable for American audiences in diluted, stripped-down form.
Nakata is the second Japanese director to "go American," and it should be noted that the other, "The Grudge" director Takashi Shimizu, was way ahead of the curve, beating the originality and charm out of his exciting pair of low-budget ghost stories ("Ju-on: The Curse" and "Ju-on: The Curse 2") with two smoother, friendly remakes in his home country ("Ju-on: The Grudge" and "Ju-on: The Grudge 2") before kicking the dead horse one more time with the American remake "The Grudge."
Although he's a much more talented than Shimizu, Nakata's first American film can't escape the look and feel of a third-generation dub of its original. Taking a different angle than the Japanese sequel, Nakata creates a fractured, test-audience pleasing yarn that burns out quickly and then begins to resemble another of his films, 2002's "Dark Water."
Trying to put the cursed videotape and its unfriendly ghost behind them, Rachel (Naomi Watts) moves with her son Aidan (David Dorfman) to a small town, takes a job at a local newspaper and tries to put the pieces back together.
But soon the tape catches up to them. In "The Ring," Rachel and Aidan were forced to make a copy of the videotape and pass it along to an unsuspecting person in order to spare themselves. We shouldn't be surprised that this catches up to them sooner, and not later. The opening is similar to the original: a pair of young teens, an empty house, a dare and a VCR. But we've seen it all before: the spooky tape, the deformed face of its victims, and of course, the pale-faced girl with wet, black hair climbing methodically out of a well and reaching through the television set.
"The Ring" saved this showstopper for its second climax; "Ring" did it so perfectly that a final extreme close-up of Samara's blood-shot eye remains one of the great images in all of horror cinema. But as most sequels discover, you can never re-capture the first time.
As the film progresses, it becomes evident that the young Aidan is possessed by Samara's spirit. This wrinkle would become little more than a rehashing of "The Exorcist" or "The Omen" with most directors, but Nakata gives it a chilling gravity. In "Dark Water," the director's most accomplished film, an ill-kept water tower symbolizes the haunting legacy of un-parented children. Here Nakata uses murky, black water to show the discontented spirit world seeping into the living. Both films are about the decaying relationship between generations and how the parents' failure trickles down to their children, where it manifests and ultimately seals the fate of both.
In "Dark Water" and "The Ring 2," a sacrifice is required to set things straight, but only in the former does this act have any meaning. Unfortunately, "Dark Water" is scheduled for a remake later this year, so this powerful, heart-wrenching lesson is likely to be lost in translation.
As expected, "The Ring 2" ends with a disturbing act diffused by its lack of consequences. By contrast, "The Ring" (directed by Gore Verbinski) had a much more lasting conclusion with Rachel deciding to save her child and pass the buck to an untold number of innocent people. But in the sequel, this selfish act doesn't have any lasting consequences and the family is spared.
For Hollywood, the lesson is clear: as long as we keep making sequels, we'll never have to come to terms with the issues raised by the originals. While the rest of the world, in horror as in most things, continues to be light-years ahead of us.
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