Delayed Reaction: Ringu

Premise: There’s a tape that kills you seven days after you watch it.

 

This is the Japanese original that the 2002 American The Ring was based on. You know that insufferable guy who, after you say you liked The Ring says “It’s not as good as the Japanese original”? This is the movie he’s talking about.

 

My stance on American remakes has long been that there’s nothing wrong with remaking a movie for American audiences. The problem is when they remake the movies badly. If they take a great idea and hand it to bad filmmakers with mediocre stars, the result is going to be bad. The Ring is the best-case scenario. It had a future Oscar nominee as the star and a filmmaker who quickly turned into one of our better populist filmmakers. The result was a movie that took the idea and much of the plot of the original but made it distinct and different.

 

I prefer The Ring to Ringu, and I admit that a lot of that is probably because I saw The Ring first. The movies aren’t that different. Many scenes are exactly the same. The structure is incredibly similar. The best scares are almost identical as well. So, I did really like this movie.

 

I do think there are a few differences that make Ringu a little inferior in my eyes. For one, it is a cheaper movie with less atmosphere. Part of what makes The Ring so great is how dreary and overcast it is. A good amount of money went into the look of the movie. Ringu has a smaller budget and films things more as they are. There’s some power in that too: generating scares from how commonplace everything is despite the impending doom. The Ring does a better job picking where to explain and not explain the story. Ringu has a backstory about the little girl having telepathic abilities and her father making a show of that. It was too much. I prefer how The Ring just makes Samara evil and doesn’t explain it much beyond that.

 

One place Ringu absolutely is superior is the very end. That’s fucking brutal. In The Ring, the rule was just that you have to make a copy. In Ringu, you must make a copy and show it to someone. The end of the movie implies that the protagonist is going to show it to her father to save her son. I loved that.

 

Sorry that I didn’t talk about Ringu on its own. That’s impossible for me to do. The comparison is what interests me about it. If I was just talking about it on its own, I’d just say it was very familiar (since I’ve seen The Ring). For fans of The Ring though, it’s really fun to watch Ringu for the comparison.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend