It’s been twelve years since the US last got a Ring movie which is surprising because the
timeline for another one of these should’ve been never. Does anyone in the states care about this
series? To try for a third picture seems
like a fool’s errand to me. The first
one is completely self contained and unique in the world of horror. The base premise is pure horror material
(watch a video and in seven days a ghost will pop out of your TV and kill you)
but the movie plays out much more like a mystery thriller. It’s almost film noir-ish with the characters
piecing together what happened to this fucked up little girl. Once the full story is discovered and a cure
for the cursed viewer is stumbled upon there isn’t anything else to tell. It’s over.
Vamoose babe.
But the studio execs couldn’t help themselves and went for a
sequel. It was absolutely terrible. You can read what I thought here. Then nothing for a long while. Now we got number three to contend with.
The first thing you should probably know is that this is not
really a sequel even though it’s been touted as such. All evidence shows this is a reboot. Nothing is mentioned of the first two
installments whatsoever, Samara’s backstory is tweaked and certain rules in the
Ring universe are changed.
But here’s how shit goes down. It starts with some dude on a plane who reaches
his seven day milestone. He chats with a
chick across the aisle telling her (the audience) about a video that eventually
kills you after you watch it. She thinks
he’s a weirdo but then all of a sudden the plane goes haywire and Samara murders
the guy. It’s an open question if the
others on the flight survived. Would
Samara massacre a whole airplane full of folks just to take out one man? If everyone on board really did die then that’s
fucking bullshit. The only person that
should die is the cursed individual.
Plus we know what the outcome is when there are witnesses. In the first film the friend of the victim in
the opening scene becomes traumatized.
She ends up in a mental hospital and doesn’t really speak or emote at
all. Did this happen to the passengers
on the plane? We never find out.
Skip to Professor Gabriel (Johnny Galecki (In Time)) buying the VCR of the guy who
died on the flight at a flea market. He likes
it ‘cause it’s “vintage”. When he takes
the thing back to his way cool warehouse bachelor pad he jams a screwdriver in
the video slot because that’s how you get a VCR to work? What the fuck is he doing? I bet Galecki (who was forty when they made
this (yea the math is a little off but I’ll get to why later on)) was like “do I
really have to do this? I grew up with this
technology and this doesn’t make any damn sense”. Anyway a VHS tape pops out (on its own mind
you, not from the fiddling with the screwdriver) and the good professor lights
up a joint and puts the tape on.
Although I swear I remember the tape starting to play by itself but
whatever.
Skip to our boyfriend/girlfriend main leads, Holt ((Alex Roe
(The 5th Wave)) and Julia
(Matilda Lutz in her first major role), saying their goodbyes to each other
because Holt is off to college. We never
find out why Julia is staying behind at home and not also going to college. There could be a million reasons for this and
it doesn’t really matter, but it’s kinda lazy filmmaking to not even have one
throwaway line to explain.
After six weeks or so Julia gets a Skype call from Holt
except when she picks up it’s some lady looking for Holt and she’s all panicky
spouting cryptic inane shit to get the audience stirred up. Julia decides to investigate and drives to
Holt’s college. She finds Professor
Gabriel who gives her the runaround on Holt and scurries off as quickly as he
can. Thinking this is suspicious Julia tails
him to the seventh floor of one of the main school buildings. She finds that the entire floor has been
taken over by a mess of students and Gabriel conducting some sort of experiment
with the cursed video. There are
countdown clocks on the wall, video projections of scenes from the tape and
what appears to be all out partying. It’s
a pretty strange sight. Eventually Julia
finds Holt and they journey to solve what the shit on the tape is or means.
So this is similar to the first picture except there’s one
big difference. It’s true that in The Ring (and Ringu) our leading ladies were trying to decipher the images on the
tape but they were also looking for a way out of the curse. They only had a week so there was a major ticking
clock element to the story. In Rings everyone knows how to exorcize themselves
of the curse from the get go. Presumably
Professor Gabriel figured this out and told his Guinea pigs. The very large problem though is that we’re
never shown or told just how Gabriel knew to make a copy and show it to someone
else to lift the curse. That’s too big
of a fucking hole to leave in your movie guy.
Again, there’s no reference to the first two films so there needs to be
a discovery of the solution somehow in here and it’s not there. The filmmakers are going on the assumption
the audience knows how this works so they didn’t rehash it. That was a really bad decision.
Now since all of our characters have a certified way of
dealing with the curse there’s no excuse for anyone to die. They have the knowledge to set themselves
free. But guess what? Every single person waits until the last
goddamn minute to do anything about it.
Put yourself in their shoes. Would
you try to relieve yourself of imminent assured death right away or put it off
for six days and twenty three hours? I
get that there needs to be tension ‘n’ shit in your movie but having every character,
except Julia, be negligent and/or braindead doesn’t make me care about
them. They had their wide open shot to
deal with it and they fucked it up. So
fuck them. This is some dumb
scriptwriting fellas.
Spoilers in this next
paragraph, skip to the following one if you don’t want to know Samara’s new
backstory
With Samara’s backstory the filmmakers decided to rewrite
it. The part about her being born pure
evil and infecting her hometown with plight is all there. But the change is her father was one wicked asshole
sonuvabitch that maybe actually wanted a demon child. You see this small town reverend raped a
local girl and then kept her locked up in a secret bunker beneath the church
during the pregnancy. When the baby was born
she had special powers and things went bad in the town so she had to go. I don’t think it’s ever explained but I guess
the father is the one that tossed Samara down the well to kill her. So daddy’s the co-villain in this installment
which I’m fine with because it changes it up enough. Otherwise it’s exactly the same old shit you’ve
seen before.
You’re safe from here
on out
I have to bring up the religious symbolism they threw
in. The
Ring series was never about religion, at least the American ones. The original Japanese picture had some
spiritualism sprinkled in but it was in the background. In Rings
the filmmakers for some reason felt that there needed to be a Christian connection
and imply that Samara’s the anti-Christ.
You got a church, a priest, many visions of crucifixes, you could say
Samara rises from the dead, a flood and a swarm of cicadas (‘cause I suppose
locusts would’ve been just a little too on the nose). I don’t necessarily mind the film trying this
out but at the same time part of why I like the Ring universe is because there aren’t any religious aspects to
it. It’s simply a magical curse and a
nasty chick that comes to kill you in a week.
Usually something like that would have
a religious angle but the concept is so intriguing that extra help isn’t needed
to sell it. It’s non-discriminatory that
way and I like it.
Probably the weirdest aspect to the entire movie though is
that we’re still dealing with a cursed VHS tape. Sure, they make an attempt to update the technology
by converting it to a video file you can watch on a computer. But even that method is outdated or only used
by certain professionals. The real
update is YouTube or some similar video streaming site. But I can understand why they didn’t want to
open that can of worms. If YouTube were
involved everyone in the world would be cursed and then how do you make a copy
and share it to save yourself? Shit gets
way too messy so they sidestepped it.
They also dodged the fact that all of the students who took place in the
college experiment would’ve uploaded the cursed video to YouTube as soon as
they got their hands on it. It’s a
fucking miracle no one did.
However, having the video be available on YouTube was
already done in Sadako 3D, the fifth
film in the Japanese line that came out in 2012. But they went off in a totally bonkers
direction for that picture which I actually kinda enjoyed. That one plays out more like a grindhouse
movie where Sadako (the Samara equivalent) can use her giant hair as a weapon by
twirling it around and there’s an army of half bug half Sadako creatures and
all sorts of stuff. American audiences
would never go for something like that in this context. Maybe if it were its own thing and not a Ring movie. But to completely change the format and
attempt a radically different approach would put too many folks off. So if you like the idea of the Ring but are frustrated with the American
ones then check out the Japanese films.
They’ve made so many sequels and they all do their own distinct thing. I wish the American studios would take more
chances on different tones and styles for sequels but they know that shit doesn’t
really sell here. So we tend to get the
same damn thing over and over.
Rings was shot in
2015 and originally scheduled to come out the same year. But reshoots and schedule changes pushed this
sucker into 2017 (that’s why the math didn’t seem to add up earlier). It’s never good when a film sits for that
long because it shows that the studio has no faith in it. They kinda need to realize the Ring concept isn’t franchise-able. Hey Hollywood, you have to accept it’s only one
movie. And if you’re unwilling to go way
off course then you’re gonna inevitably and boringly repeat yourself.
The changes they made here aren’t nearly enough to breathe
new life into the ol’ gal. Even the last
little twist (minor spoiler) sets up
the idea used in The Ring Two where
Samara is looking for a way to cross over into the real world full time. Look, overall this is bland crap that I’ll
forget about tomorrow. But that was expected
and the sad part is some amount of disappointment goes along with that notion. There’s a tiny piece of your mind that thinks
it could be a surprisingly good piece of work but alas, the odds prove out and the
house wins. So there’s nothing to see
here folks. Keep moving.
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