Post by George Willson on Nov 25, 2005 22:40:00 GMT -5
This is the Korean version of the Ring story, and it has its own positives to bring to the tale. With these positives, it also brings its negatives as well.
First, like Ringu, it lacks the terror element of the American version of impending doom. You have seven days to live, sure, but at the same time you have nothing happening to you that reinforces that idea. You just have to believe it. Like Ringu, the only thing that keeps them going is their distorted face in the photographs. My question is always, Is that enough to drive someone that hard to learn the truth?
I do like the way the story unfolds from sctratch. Unlike the Japanese and American versions, we don't begin with a conversation about the video. We begin with the same opening scene, but it is with a lone girl. We don't know anything about her, or why she would have died. From there the movie unfolds very investigatively. The reporter has to discover the reason the girl died on her own, which is done very logically. In this version, the tape contains the details we need to understand the tape, including the cure...which is unfortunately taped over.
You can always tell which parts of the movie are likely parts of the novel, as the tedious and pointless well-emptying scene that took up time in Ringu was in this version as well. The Ring thankfully found another way to pass the time. The ending remained the same as well.
I think the movie lost a little something by not having the reporter in some measure of a relationship with her partner, but at the same time, the child played almost no role in this version either. Many of the investigative scenes ran slowly and tediously throughout the middle. There was no explanation why they would believe retreiving our psycho friend's body from the bottom of the well would work. In fact, in light of there being instructions on the video, it makes very little sense. Imagine reading, "In order to live, you must retrieve my body from the well and lay me to rest." Right.
This one omitted the time frame and made Eun-suh's (Samara/Sadako) a very recent event...a change that makes little sense in light of a hotel being erected on that very spot. It also gave her a bizarre trait, and had some very strange gender-bending overtones that added nothing beyond a reason for her to die...from a very disturbing relationship, I might add.
Overall, this version had enough positives to make it worth a viewing, but in my opinion, enough negatives to make it a third overall of the three versions I've seen. The investigative part at the beginning was a HUGE plus, and it was refreshing not to have everything handed over psychically, but it got slow and the bit regarding Eun-suh's "secret" was way too disturbing.
As a side note, this video has an English dub, so I set it for English. I noticed that the English subtitles were defaulted to on, and I almost turned them off before I discovered that the subtitles were telling some different info than what was being spoken. Maybe I marred my enjoyment of the film by this amusement, but I couldn't bring myself to turn off the subtitles. The first bizarre change between the dub and the subtitles was this: on the phone in the teaser, there is a guy in the dub, but a girl in the subtitles (don't learn this till much later in the film and it made things really confusing for a bit). The subtitles have really bad dialogue and gags, while the dub is much more crisp and better constructed. The subtitles contain exposition the dub doesn't. The subtitles have interjections that the dub doesn't. I think the movie is complete both ways, but it was amusing...
First, like Ringu, it lacks the terror element of the American version of impending doom. You have seven days to live, sure, but at the same time you have nothing happening to you that reinforces that idea. You just have to believe it. Like Ringu, the only thing that keeps them going is their distorted face in the photographs. My question is always, Is that enough to drive someone that hard to learn the truth?
I do like the way the story unfolds from sctratch. Unlike the Japanese and American versions, we don't begin with a conversation about the video. We begin with the same opening scene, but it is with a lone girl. We don't know anything about her, or why she would have died. From there the movie unfolds very investigatively. The reporter has to discover the reason the girl died on her own, which is done very logically. In this version, the tape contains the details we need to understand the tape, including the cure...which is unfortunately taped over.
You can always tell which parts of the movie are likely parts of the novel, as the tedious and pointless well-emptying scene that took up time in Ringu was in this version as well. The Ring thankfully found another way to pass the time. The ending remained the same as well.
I think the movie lost a little something by not having the reporter in some measure of a relationship with her partner, but at the same time, the child played almost no role in this version either. Many of the investigative scenes ran slowly and tediously throughout the middle. There was no explanation why they would believe retreiving our psycho friend's body from the bottom of the well would work. In fact, in light of there being instructions on the video, it makes very little sense. Imagine reading, "In order to live, you must retrieve my body from the well and lay me to rest." Right.
This one omitted the time frame and made Eun-suh's (Samara/Sadako) a very recent event...a change that makes little sense in light of a hotel being erected on that very spot. It also gave her a bizarre trait, and had some very strange gender-bending overtones that added nothing beyond a reason for her to die...from a very disturbing relationship, I might add.
Overall, this version had enough positives to make it worth a viewing, but in my opinion, enough negatives to make it a third overall of the three versions I've seen. The investigative part at the beginning was a HUGE plus, and it was refreshing not to have everything handed over psychically, but it got slow and the bit regarding Eun-suh's "secret" was way too disturbing.
As a side note, this video has an English dub, so I set it for English. I noticed that the English subtitles were defaulted to on, and I almost turned them off before I discovered that the subtitles were telling some different info than what was being spoken. Maybe I marred my enjoyment of the film by this amusement, but I couldn't bring myself to turn off the subtitles. The first bizarre change between the dub and the subtitles was this: on the phone in the teaser, there is a guy in the dub, but a girl in the subtitles (don't learn this till much later in the film and it made things really confusing for a bit). The subtitles have really bad dialogue and gags, while the dub is much more crisp and better constructed. The subtitles contain exposition the dub doesn't. The subtitles have interjections that the dub doesn't. I think the movie is complete both ways, but it was amusing...