The Ring

The Ring is a 2002 American remake of the 1998 Japanese horror film of the same name (also known as Ringu). Both movies are based on the novel of the same name by Kôji Suzuki. Directed by Gore Verbinski and starring Naomi Watts and Martin Henderson, The Ring was a financial success.

The film focuses on a mysterious cursed videotape which contains a seemingly random series of disturbing, grainy, black and white images. After watching the tape, the viewer receives a phone call in which a voice condemns the viewer to death in exactly seven days.

As the film opens, two teenage girls Katie Embry (Amber Tamblyn) and Rebecca 'Becca' Kotler (Rachael Bella) discuss the supposedly cursed tape. Katie reveals that, seven days before, she went to a cabin at Shelter Mountain Inn with friends, where she viewed the video tape. After a series of strange occurrences, involving a television in the house turning itself on, Katie is mysteriously killed while Becca watches, causing her to be institutionalized in a mental hospital.

Katie's aunt, Rachel (Naomi Watts), is a journalist living in Seattle. At Katie's funeral, Rachel's sister asks her to investigate her daughter's death. Her investigation leads her to the cabin where Katie watched the tape. She finds and watches the tape, the phone rings and a girl says "seven days." The next day she calls her ex-boyfriend and her precocious son Aidan and his father, Noah, to see the video. He asks her to make a copy for further investigation. Aidan watches the tape a couple of days later.

After viewing the tape, Rachel experiences nightmares, nose bleeds, and surreal situations (when she pauses a section of the tape in which a fly runs across the screen, she plucks it from the monitor). Rachel investigates the images on the tape, leading her to Anna Morgan (a woman seen in the tape) who lived on Moesko Island with her husband Richard and daughter. A tragedy befell the Morgan ranch, in which the horses they raised seemed to go mad and kill themselves, presumably causing Anna to become depressed and commit suicide. Rachel goes to the Morgan house and finds Richard who refuses to talk about the video or his daughter. A local doctor tells Rachel that Anna could not carry a baby to term and adopted a child named Samara Morgan (Daveigh Chase). Anna soon complained of visions that only happened when Samara was around, so both were sent to a mental institute. Noah goes to the institute, finds Anna's file and discovers that a video is missing. Rachel returns to the Morgan house, views the missing video and is confronted by Richard, who states the girl was evil. Following an intense scene, he then electrocutes himself in the bathtub, sending Rachel running out of the house screaming.

Noah arrives and with Rachel, goes to the barn to discover a room where Samara was kept by her father. Behind the wallpaper they discover an image of a tree seen on the tape, and near the cabin. At the cabin, they discover a well underneath the floor, in which Rachel finds the body of Samara, experiencing a vision of how her mother dropped her into it. Rachel notifies the authorities, and Samara is given a proper burial.

Rachel informs Aidan that they will no longer be troubled by Samara. However, Aidan is horrified, telling his mother she had freed her body, and that Samara never sleeps. In his apartment, Noah's TV turns on, revealing an image in which Samara crawls from the well, walks toward the screen and crawls out of the set into the room. Samara stares directly at him, causing his death from fright — which Rachel discovers after racing to his apartment. Upon returning to her apartment, Rachel destroys and burns the original tape screaming, "What do you want from me!?" She soon notices the tape marked "COPY" underneath the couch. Worried that Aidan will also die, Rachel realizes the only way to escape is to copy the tape and show it to someone else, continuing the cycle. The movie ends with Rachel helping Aidan to copy the tape.

In order to advertise the film, many promotional websites were formed featuring the characters and places in the film.^[1] The film was financially successful; the box office gross actually increased from its 1st weekend to its 2nd, as the initial success led DreamWorks to roll the film into 700 additional theatres.^[2] The success of The Ring opened the way for American remakes of several other Japanese horror films, including The Grudge and Dark Water. 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.

The Ring received fairly positive reviews from film critics, receiving a “fresh” 72% favorable reviews out of 166 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes,^[3] and a Metacritic score of 57/100 (mixed or average) from 36 reviews.^[4] On the television program Ebert & Roeper, Richard Roeper gave the film "Thumbs Up" and felt it was very gripping and scary despite some minor unanswered questions. Roger Ebert gave the film "Thumbs Down" and felt it was boring, borderline ridiculous and disliked the extended, detailed ending.^[5] IGN’s Jeremy Conrad praised the movie for its atmospheric set up and cinematography, and said that “there are 'disturbing images'… but the film doesn't really rely on gore to deliver the scares. … The Ring relies on atmosphere and story to deliver the jumps, not someone being cleaved in half by a glass door.”^[6] Film Threat Jim Agnew called it “dark, disturbing and original throughout. You know that you’re going to see something a little different than your usual studio crap.”^[7] Praise went to the director Gore Verbinski for slowly revealing the plot while keeping the audience interested, “the twists keep on coming, and Verbinski shows a fine-tuned gift for calibrating and manipulating viewer expectations.”^[8]

Despite the praise given to Verbinski’s direction, critics railed the characters as being weak. The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaurn said that the film was “an utter waste of Watts… perhaps because the script didn’t bother to give her a character,”^[9] whereas other critics such as William Arnold from Seattle Post-Intelligencer said the opposite: “she projects an intelligence, determination and resourcefulness that carry the movie nicely.”^[10] Many critics regarded David Dorfman’s character as a creepy-child “Sixth Sense cliché.”^[11] A large sum of critics, like Miami Herald’s Rene Rodriguez and USA Today’s Claudia Puig^[12] found themselves confused and thought that by the end of the movie “[the plot] still doesn't make much sense.”^[13] This movie was number 20 on the cable channel Bravo's list of the 100 Scariest Movie Moments.

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ring_(2002_film)