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The Ring (2002 film)

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"The Ring" redirects here. For other uses, see The Ring (disambiguation).
The Ring
File:The ring poster2.jpg
Directed byGore Verbinski
Written byEhren Kruger
Produced byWalter F. Parkes
Roy Lee
Laurie MacDonald
Michael Macari
StarringNaomi Watts
Martin Henderson
David Dorfman
Brian Cox
Daveigh Chase
CinematographyBojan Bazelli
Edited byCraig Wood
Music byHans Zimmer
Distributed byDreamWorks SKG
Release dates
October 18, 2002 (USA)
Running time
115 min.
LanguageEnglish
Budget$48 million

The Ring is a 2002 American remake of the 1998 Japanese film, Ringu. It was directed by Gore Verbinski and starred Naomi Watts and Martin Henderson.

Plot

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The story begins with two teenage girls discussing the events of the previous weekend, during which one of them, Katie, went to a cabin in the mountains to spend time with some friends. While talking, the subject of a supposedly cursed videotape is brought up. The other girl, Becca, states that anyone who watches this video receives a phone call, in which a voice says, "seven days". Then, exactly seven days after viewing the tape, the viewer dies. Katie reveals in horror that she had watched that video at the cabin last weekend, exactly seven days earlier. After a series of unexplainable occurrences, involving T.V.s in the house turning themselves on and unexplained pools of water, Katie is mysteriously killed, while Becca goes insane.

The film then introduces Katie's aunt, Rachel, a journalist living in Seattle. Her son, Aidan, was not only Katie's cousin but also a good friend, and seems to be sensitive to psychic occurrences. At Katie's funeral Rachel begins investigating Katie's death and learns of the videotape. Her investigation leads her to the same cabin in the mountains where the teenagers had watched the tape. There, she finds the tape and eventually watches it. She shows it to Noah, Aidan's father, and Aidan himself watches it a few days later.

Rachel's investigation then turns to the tape itself, which contains a seemingly random series of disturbing, grainy black & white images. Investigating those images leads Rachel to learn of a girl, Samara, who had been adopted and then murdered by those parents. They had killed Samara when they believed she had caused her mother to go insane as well as causing the deaths of several horses. Rachel is eventually led to where the girl was killed; a watery grave at the bottom of a well. Rachel notifies the authorities, and Samara is given a proper burial, presumably putting her spirit to rest.

However, just as it seems that everything is well again, Samara kills Noah. Rachel and Aidan realize that the only way to escape Samara after watching the video is to make a copy of the tape and show it to someone else, thus continuing the cycle.

Misc. Info

Produced by DreamWorks SKG, the film was a popular success, earning a total of US$129,094,024 in domestic box office receipts and a worldwide total of $249 million.

The success of The Ring opened the way for American remakes of several other Japanese horror films, including The Grudge. A sequel, The Ring Two, was released in North American theaters on March 18, 2005. It was directed by Hideo Nakata, the director of the original Japanese film.

Just before the release of the sequel, The Ring was re-released with an extra disc that had a fifteen minute short film, Rings, which was intended to bridge The Ring and The Ring Two.

The Ring debuted on network TV on ABC on Monday, June 6, 2005 at 9 PM EST, 8 PM PST. It was rated TV-14 V (for violence) with a viewer discretion warning for violent content.

Trivia

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  • There are brief flashes of the "ring" motif throughout the film.
  • The bizarre music on the cursed videotape is the same noise as Anna closing the lid on the well.
  • Ringu wasn't released in theaters when The Ring was in theaters, but appeared on DVD around the DVD release of The Ring.
  • The "Don't Watch This" feature on the DVD has footage deleted from the film and meshed into a short film without a specific plot.
  • According to director Gore Verbinski, he would occasionally get into heated arguments over the production with producer Walter F. Parkes.
  • On stop-motion animated show The Wrong Coast, they say that Ringu was based on an earlier American film called The Onion Ring. In this parody, Rachel is convinced that the death of the girl in the beginning of the film has something to do with onion rings, even when the evidence clearly points to Samara and the videotape.
  • The term "ring" refers to the ring of light that Samara saw and the endless cycle of Samara's deadly video.
  • Hidden Samara in plain sight* On the DVD box cover featuring the photogragh of the well scene, and also the well scene in the cursed video as shown in the movie, the sum of the composition of the frame is Samara staring out at the viewer. The well itself are her nostrils, the haze in the mid-ground is her face, while the trees in the background contain her eyes and form the hair that partially obstructs her face.


Differences between The Ring and Ringu

  • The name of the character Reiko Asakawa was changed to Rachel Keller.
  • The name of the son is changed from Yoichi to Aidan.
  • Ryuuji Takahama is now Noah Clay.
  • The strange images on the tape.
  • All the actors have been swapped
  • To cater to American audiences, all the actors were changed from Asians to Caucasians.

(See: the Cursed Videotape)

  • Name of girl in Japanese tape: Sadako; name of girl in American tape: Samara.
  • In Ringu, the ghost girl's victims just have their mouths open with fear. In this one, the ghost girl's victims look bloated and rotten, as if they've been underwater for some time.
  • The mother, called Anna, jumps off a cliff, while in Ringu, the mother jumped into a volcano.
  • In Ringu, the ex-boyfriend possesses the psychic ability, not the son.
  • In Ringu, the ghost girl is 18 and is murdered by her father. While in "The Ring" American remake, she is only 8 and is murdered by her mother.
  • In Ringu, the ghost girl was supposedly alive in the well for 30 years before dying. While in "The Ring" American remake, she survived in the well for only seven days before dying (in a likely explanation of why viewers of the tape die after seven days).
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