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Notes on The Ring 2 3/20/2005 12:13:41 AM
A capsule review of The Ring 2 that explores the structure of the story. The first American Ring movie scared me. I also noted that many of its production techniques started showing up in subsequent horror films. When I read the mixed reviews for The Ring 2, as always I was curious to discover why. The main problem in The Ring 2 is the most common problem in movies that fail to reward the attention of an audience, a failure to give a main character a clear goal, and a failure to develop narrative tension around that goal.
In the first Ring movie, a mother views a video tape and realizes the threat that accompanies the tape, that she'll die in a week if she watches it, is true. When her son accidentally views the tape, she frantically goes on a journey to discover the source of the tape and somehow save her son's life. As she seeks out clues, the viewers of the film find out more about the images on the video.
The elements of the film that work well are a main character who is compelled to act with greater and greater urgency around a clearly presented goal. In this case, the time frame of the story, that she has one week to save her son, adds to the drama. The creepy, jittery images on the video add to the sense of weirdnes the movie generates. At the heart of the story is an issue of parents listening to children.
In the sequel, the first third of the film re-introduces that the ghost of the girl from the first film/video tape is back and after the mother's son. But, why, and what the mother should do about it, is diffuse. Things happen. Worse, the production values in the first third of the film are on a par with a weekly network television series.
About a third of the way into the film, the mother finally has a clear goal, to find out more about the ghost, and to be reunited with her son (taken from her because he appears to be abused). This raises the issue of her need to a good mother, which, ultimately, is what the story is about.
Two-thirds of the way into the film, the mother learns she must kill her son to save him. Now we have a character in a state of narrative tension. She must do something she can't do, but to fail to act is to leave her son possessed by an evil spirit. Now the movie finally a good story.
But it's too little, too late.
The movie also fails to overcome some illogical scenes. The son wakes up with a nightmare in the middle of the night and the mother takes him to the small town newspaper where she's an editor...and everyone who works for the paper is sitting at their desks. No reason why is offered. In another scene, the mother and son are attacked on a highway for a reason that is never made clear. The scene or dialogue that would have provided an explanation was apparently left out of the movie.
