‘Rings’ Review: A tedious and monotonous rehash

Note: This review discusses plot points from Rings. 

It should have a required more than just a nagging need to squeeze that final cent out of a franchise to force a revival from a hiatus of more than 10 years, yet predictable Hollywood, with its penchant to expose most of the symptoms of creative bankruptcy, has just done it again.

Saving Samara

F. Javier Gutierrez’s Rings is sort of a sequel to Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002) and Hideo Nakata’s The Ring Two, a duo of films that saw themselves as unneccessary revamps of Nakata’s own cult classic Ringu (1998) to suit Western audiences. 

If anything, the two films are interesting experiments, considering that they mostly adopted the mythos of the vengeful spirit they named Samara, who murders the unfortunate viewers of a cursed videotape. They emphasized on building it up as a ghost story with clear villains and victims rather than an enigmatic modern parable. The American remakes clearly understood its market, focusing not on the scope of its horror but on the characters they concentrated on.

As a result, Samara became something of an icon, winning a number of copycats and parodies. Fame however is a fickle thing, and without a truly memorable film to carry it, the character is bound for obscurity in a landscape that is quickly being populated by evil dolls, demons, and other unspeakable horrors. 

Rings feels like that last ditch effort to rescue the infamous character out of obsolescence. It is just unfortunate that the film reeks of desperation, with all its shoddy attempts to scare using a character that has lost its luster and intrigue from overexposure a long time ago. 

Wasted promise

It almost seemed like Rings would take Samara’s tale into a different direction, one that promises to be markedly and thematically distinct from the two previous filmns.

Early in the movie, college student Holt (Alex Roe) tells his girlfriend Julia (Matilda Lutz) the story of Orpheus, how the Greek hero tried to save his lady love from the underworld. Julia then made a comment as to why it is always the man who rescues the girl. As it turns out, she will be put in a position where she rescues her boyfriend from certain death when she willingly watches the cursed video. 

How Holt came in possession of Samara’s infamous video is a narrative thread worth exploring which the movie manages to discard in favor of less remarkable twists and turns. It all started when Gabriel (Johnny Galecki), Holt’s professor, discovered the video and thought it would be a good idea to recruit his careless and curious students to sacrifice themselves to further his investigation on the existence of the soul.

Rings could have been that thoroughly bizarre hodgepodge of horror and sci-fi that attempts to touch on existential musings. Unfortunately, Gutierrez and his studio executives prefer the safer route of having its main characters drive their way to another sleepy town in the middle of nowhere, full of suspicious inhabitants, to fulfill the requirement of needlessly expanding the lore behind poor, overused Samara.

Riskless montony

As a result, Rings feels like a sorry repetition, one that fails to match the consistency of mood and atmosphere of Verbinski and Nakata’s movies but staggers on by sheer virtue of convention. 

Samara isn’t the biggest evil here. It is Hollywood’s preference for riskless monotony, that horrible vice that has sucked most of the horror out of this horror franchise, turning it into just a routine series of jump scares, creaky noises, illogical protagonists, and other things that we’ve all seen before and we’ve all grown bored of. – Rappler.com

Francis Joseph Cruz litigates for a living and writes about cinema for fun. The first Filipino movie he saw in the theaters was Carlo J. Caparas’ ‘Tirad Pass.’ Since then, he’s been on a mission to find better memories with Philippine cinema.