Chapter Two: The Ring Two
By Brett Ballard-Beach
December 6, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Any thoughts that I had of renting it on DVD when it came out for a second viewing were squelched (perversely, I admit), by the listed running time of the unrated edition. As I recall, this was a stretch of time when I was disgusted/fed up/pissed off with every film passing off unrated editions that amounted to little more than a minute of footage that in all probability had been approved by the MPAA but then pulled out at the last moment by the studio to allow for . . . an unrated edition. (Feel free to mock both me and the cynicism-fed high horse I rode in on.)
When I saw the running time of 128 minutes on the back, I blanched. I knew the theatrical cut had been about 110 minutes. I also knew that there was a short film entitled Rings, intended as a bridge between the two Ring films, on the disc and that it ran about 17 minutes. What I deduced was that Rings was included in that new running time and that any new footage amounted to a minute if not mere second. Seven years late, I can cop to being ridiculously wrong. And to clarify how wrong, I didn’t notice any of the new scenes or slightly altered existing scenes in the unrated cut (post-screening, I went to a website that does side by side analysis of unrated and theatrical versions) and up until the 100-minute mark, I was still thinking I was in the right. More on all that shortly.
I also screened The Ring again for the first time in several years, almost in disbelief that the 10th anniversary of its release had passed. I remember seeing that with my first wife and a friend of hers, in what I recall was an early screening the weekend before to drum up word-of-mouth. My reaction to my viewing last weekend is fairly similar to what it was a decade ago, and indeed, the several viewings in the interim: serious goosebumps are raised in the first half, and then the film becomes too much like a Scooby-Doo mystery: intent on explaining concretely every abstract image in the videotape, thereby diminishing a lot of its mindfuck bizarreness.
The finale, even if it is cribbed from the Japanese original Ringu, is one climax too much. When Samara is shown emerging from the television to claim the life of reporter Rachel Keller’s (Naomi Watts) ex-husband, it diminishes the monster. The CGI is admirably rendered. It is not an issue of phoniness. It’s more an example of showing too much, or giving the demon too much “freedom” (I would always argue that the caged Hannibal Lecter was more frightening than the one on the loose). I guess we should be grateful that it is never explicitly shown what exactly Samara does to turn her victim’s faces into the elongated gaping grimace/rictus that defines them in their death. Additionally, by going on 15 minutes too long and gunning for the final twist - that what Rachel achieves by discovering the truth of Samara’s death isn’t to set her soul at rest but unleash her evil into the world - leaves too much time for questions to be raised. The first and foremost of the questions is: Why for the love of god couldn’t Rachel’s son Aidan (David Dorfman), who has a psychic/spiritual connection to Samara, have clued everyone in a little earlier to the fact that Samara is evil?
What both The Ring and The Ring Two achieve successfully, first and foremost, is a bait and switch on the audience via their bravura opening sequences (which would be the pre-credit or pre-title sequences under most circumstances), each of which becomes a hard act for the rest of the film to follow. The Ring’s six-minute opening - with two female teens in schoolgirl uniforms home alone and freaking each other out in a bout of gotcha one-upmanship - suggests that this will be another tale of (soon to be) dead teenagers. Instead it becomes a portrait of two dysfunctional and broken nuclear families in tandem (albeit one significantly more fucked up than the other, what with the attempted infanticide, lots of dead horses, several suicides.)
The Ring Two’s 12 minute opening set piece begins with two teens as well (male/female this time) and after marvelously skirting any sense of dread or horror for the first half, ramps up the tension and goes for the jugular, becoming especially witty in its equation of being goaded into watching the video with being talked into sex or intimacy before one is ready. Nonetheless, it makes the case that this will be another tale of a certain videotape wreaking havoc and leading to death (one week removed) for anyone who views it. But by the 30-minute mark, the videotape is no more and it becomes apparent that The Ring Two is concerned with an evil that has crossed over from outside boundaries (the televisual and the dream life in this case) into our waking world, in some cases taking hold inside of us.
(Sidebar 1: It also occurs to me that Rachel’s destruction of the videotape and the dead end of that as a plot hook could be a quite unsubtle reference to the death knell for videotapes in the marketplace around the time of The Ring Two’s release. If a reboot is ever attempted, will videotape seem too retro or just implausible? Will the makers attempt to use some digital form of transmission? I can’t envision how that would work. There is something inherently scary about what might be on an unlabeled videocassette and particularly the fear that one might be forced to watch it or to have no control over watching it, which has been exploited by everything from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome to Robert Scott’s The Video Dead, although that in name only perhaps. In contrast, there is nothing remotely unsettling about the format of a disc - the circularity, the sleekness, the fact that it can be used as a coaster, all render it unintimidating.)
The Ring Two keeps the same screenwriter (Ehren Kruger) and production team as the first, but switches out Gore Verbinski for Hideo Nakata, the director of the original Ringu and the first of its sequels Ringu 2. This is actually, then, a slightly novel twist on the cliché of a foreign director overseeing an English language remake of his film (re: Ole Bornedal and the ‘94/’97 versions of Nightwatch): Nakata helmed a sequel to a film that wasn’t a remake of his sequel, (though The Ring was slavishly faithful to the plot outline of Ringu) and made his English language debut to boot. (I should at this point declare I have seen relatively little J-horror.)
At various times, The Ring Two reminded me of such disparate chapter two horror/fantasy films as Exorcist II: The Heretic, Freddy’s Revenge: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, and Back to the Future II. The parallel with Exorcist II is that it revels in incomprehension while staying true to its own gonzo vision of an afflicted child thought to be cured succumbing to forces that have possessed him or her (and also the general critical thrashing it received and being viewed as a box office disappointment). The connection with Freddy’s Revenge is that The Ring Two is also a beast of duality. It’s at once a sequel that picks up after and has a direct connection to its predecessor, and also one that departs from the path it initially leads audiences down to pursue other tangents (successfully or not can be argued). And like Back to the Future II, it revisits some of the same moments and themes of the first film (in particular Rachel’s journey during the climax) but does so in the context of a much darker and cynical tone.
I don’t know if I can bluntly say whether I prefer The Ring Two to The Ring. I can be decisive in defending it against the drubbing it took at the time from the critics and its financial shortcomings in regards to the first. The Ring opened with $15.5 million and parlayed incredible word-of-mouth into a long run and a $130 million total. The Ring Two, on the basis of that goodwill, opened with $35.5 million, and then cratered, winding up with barely over two times that amount for a final tally of $76 million.
If it was expected that The Ring Two would be more of the same (and there was no reason to think that it wouldn’t), then defeated expectations could be responsible for that lingering backlash. With the emphasis less on scares and chills (there is no new equivalent to the videotape) and more on an ominous tone that seeps into everything, it doesn’t go for jolts to the system. The only sequence that comes close to that is also, I would imagine, one of the most divisive: the attack on Rachel and Aidan, inside their compact car, by scores of berserk elk.
There is precedence for this (think of the horse on the ferry in The Ring who is driven to suicide by Rachel’s presence), but seeing a mass of (not top-notch) CGI wildlife with a crazed look in their eye walks a fine line between gonzo and laughable. As someone who grew up in the middle of a national forest, I perhaps find it more unnerving than most, but also appreciate Nakata’s staging of the event, particularly the just-over-the-top-enough moment where an elk struck by the car is hurled overhead, its antler rack slicing into the roof of the car and coming dangerously close to impaling mother and son.
Where The Ring Two does falter (although it is a problem that The Ring shares to a lesser degree) is with a pair of protagonists that remain resolutely enigmatic, verging on unlikable. Perhaps that initially attracted Watts – who, King Kong aside, never seems to pick movies that are obvious commercial projects or have much chance to become blockbusters - to the role. Rachel Keller is in no way the conventional female protagonist of a horror film: a professional single mother in her 30s with brains and no social life. Watts does more for the role than it does for her, but Rachel’s relationship with her son is quirky at best, mystifying most of the time. She is part helicopter mom, part third-party observer. He insists on calling her by her first name. In no conventional sense do they enact a parent-child relationship - most times, it resembles the emotional tenor of the babysitter or next-door neighbor getting sole custody after both parents have been tragically killed - and I will allow that this creates schisms with the desire of a mainstream audience to identify with or connect with the characters they are observing. Compounding matters, the preternaturally grave Dorfman plays Aidan as a slightly less humorous version of Haley Joel Osment’s character from The Sixth Sense.
And yet, thanks to the intensity of Watts’ performance, Rachel’s love for and protective feelings towards Aidan are never in doubt. When Rachel drops her guard to her boss in The Ring Two and spills the whole ridiculous story of what’s happening, knowing that he may think her crazier than he already does, Watts underplays, keeping up a wall of reserve even as she threatens to break down. Several other performers are allowed to make notable impressions with minimal screen time. In the opening scene, Emily VanCamp conveys the indecision of the nice girl torn between her desire and her unease. Elizabeth Perkins pops up as a psychiatrist for child services who seems poised to become prominent in the proceedings, before one of the most unexpected and bizarre character exits I can recall. Gary Cole brings his patented smarmy charm to a glad-handing realtor, who has a fairly conventional exit (though one hopes he would come back) and Sissy Spacek gets jittery and foreboding as the mental patient who may hold the answer to past mysteries (but speaks mostly in cryptic clichés.)
As I mentioned at the top, despite this version running 18 minutes longer than the theatrical version I had seen, I didn’t pick up on any pacing issues that would reflect padding of any kind. Almost every scene in the film pushes the main storyline forward (or maintains the eerie ambience that blankets the film). What I can’t wrap my head around is what the film wants to say (if anything) about the nature of evil, and the horrific act of parents being driven to murder their children. The film makes some stabs towards Samara’s lineage, suggesting a supernatural conception reminiscent of mythological gods procreating with mortals, but either refuses to provide an answer or keeps it’s reasoning intentionally murky. “Post-partum depression” is tossed about skeptically (effectively demonizing or ridiculing women who have suffered from it.) Samara has supposedly always been evil, and yet appears to have been an abused child as well. Rachel must “drown” Aidan (and “kill” herself) in order to save him. The family ties that bind.
The Ring Two is that rare Chapter Two that effectively killed the franchise (although of course there have been rumblings as of late of a new installment - a sequel/reboot and most likely in 3D) and that alone made it interesting to me. But there’s an inherent tension to it as well that encapsulates a lot of what this column has been about in examining sequels - between repeating what worked and breaking the mold, reaping commercial rewards and risking audience alienation. When it works (spectacular imagery such as the water flowing upward towards the ceiling in a bathroom) it finds a way to burrow itself just under your skin. When it fails (as with The Ring, the climax on top of the climax proves to be too much, even as it bring events full circle), it’s like the gutter reaching for the stars. The falling short becomes that much more interesting.
Next time: A Chapter Two first, and my 37th birthday present to myself. One sequel, two takes. It’s Lester vs. Donner, the Man of Steel vs. himself, Superman II vs. Superman II.