Apparently I do requests now, too! I was chatting with a friend yesterday about this little project and he kindly asked if I would watch The Ring and let him know if it was as good as he remembers from his childhood. Having no other particular plans for yesterday’s film, I happily obliged.

The Ring is one of those films made interesting simply by virtue of being based on a work from another culture. Films like Big Trouble in Little China play well because the story itself was written for an American audience. But The Ring is based on a Japanese film based on a Japanese novel, almost but not quite as well-traveled a story as Snowpiercer. Although the American version takes place entirely in the United States, with exclusively American characters, there are certain scenes with distinctly Eastern-style pacing. The theme of the film is itself a very Eastern theme as well. It’s something of an unavoidable product of remaking a film for another culture. Often, audiences perceive these differences, consciously or subconsciously, and many people are turned off by them. However, judging from The Ring’s commercial success and its relatively prominent position in our collective psyche, I think it’s safe to say most audiences didn’t mind.

Personally, I found it slightly difficult to focus on the film because of the pacing as previously mentioned. Even knowing the story’s origin, even having seen it before (but admittedly only once), I simply wasn’t expecting certain scenes to last so long and certain others to be so short. These weren’t bad or wrong decisions; they were just unexpected, and as a result I found them slightly jarring. I also found much of the original fear factor absent upon already knowing the plot. I’m fully willing to admit that that’s a character flaw on my part; I’m just making honest observations. However, I was still appropriately alarmed and disturbed by the death and violence on a human empathy level. The filmmakers did a good job of making the audience emotionally invested in the characters.

To summarize my opinion of The Ring: I enjoyed watching it, and intellectually there are many aspects of the story that I like. I would watch it again, but I wouldn’t buy my own copy and watch it over and over. On a scale from 1 to the best horror movie you can imagine, I give The Ring somewhere around a 6.5.