THE SIMULTANEOUS showing o the Japanese hot horror movie Ring and its Hollywood version The Ring has afforded Filipino moviegoers the chance to compare widely divergent approaches to filmmaking. Basically, the issue boils down to technology: Is a techno-logically supeior film, such as the American The Ring , which is produced by Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks, necessarily the better movie?
Ring and The Ring have a similar plot—about a cursed videotape that kills anyone who sees it exactly after a week. After a phenomenal series of deaths, a journalist tracks down the videotape, finds her ex-husband and herself cursed, and seeks to disentangle themselves from the curse. Other than that, the story is altered in the Hollywood remake.
Both films start with two girls in a room joking about the videotape. But the Japanese victim Tomoko (Yuko Takeuchi) dies immediately after seeing the video in the living room, her American counterpart Katie (Amber Tamblyn) turns off the TV, goes back to the kitchen, and eventually dies after finding another TV open inside the room.
Gore Verbinski, director of the Hollywood version, apparently prolongs many scenes to provide a more dramatic approach. But, the original version strikes to straight-forward presentation creating a greater impact on the audience.
Regarding the enigmatic videotape, the Japanese and Hollywood versions show a woman brushing her hair in front of an antique oval mirror and a well in the middle of the woods. The Japanese version continues, showing a man with his head covered with a black cloth, people crawling in pain, scrambled letters that sum up to the word “eruption,” a local character for “Sada,” and a demonic voice speaking of brines and goblins.
The American version, on the other hand, included a white ring of light followed by a picture of a chair, a lighthouse, a woman falling from a cliff, a ladder, a centipede, a burning tree, a fly, and a host of other images. Unlike the Japanese version where every detail seems important, the Hollywood remake’s video speak literally of the protagonist’s search for unlocking the mysteries of the video.
There are also remarkable differences in the characters. The original version has a skeptical Tokyo television reporter in the person of Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima) as protagonist, the Hollywood production has a newspaper reporter, Rachel Keller, portrayed by Australian actress Naomi Watts. As Reiko seeks the help of her ex-husband Ryuji Takayama (Hiroyuki Sanada), a Math professor, to figure out how to counter the curse, while Rachel, asks help from her son’s alienated father, Noah (Martin Henderson), who runs a high-tech video editing facility. Ryuji, having extra-sensory power can detect the presence of supernatural beings like Sadako (Orie Izuno), the gruesome woman in the videotape, while Noah is limited to his wits to uncover the secret of Samara Morgan (Daveigh Chase), Sadako’s counterpart in the remake.
Most of the shocking scenes in Ring are in the grainy, black-and-white flashbacks that are shown through Ryuji’s ESP, the medium where most of the mysteries are unveiled. The remake on the other hand offers an endless explanation of the phenomenon that leads to the viewer’s confusion. It only resorts to a flashback showing how Samara is pushed into the well by her mother Anna Morgan (Shannon Cochran) to get rid of her evil ways.
The Japanese version obviously has an inferior budget compared to the remake. But what made it creepy is the absence of the special effects. No bloodshed is shown and very little horror occurs onscreen. Despite the slow pace, it manages to sustain the interest of the audience.
