So, I just watched the new Rings movie, and yeah you guessed it, It's a piece of shit. Now this movie was delayed like four fucking times. and considering the final product, I'm confused as to why Paramount didn't just release it on Halloween. Apparently, the reshoots they filmed were just so important that they decided to miss their only opportunity at cashing in on a thematically timed release. Now before I watched this film, I went back and revisited Gore Verbinski's The Ring and I gotta say, despite some general cheesiness here and there, it still holds up and I'd give it a solid 7. so if you haven't seen that movie, please pause this video, watch it, and come back. Although this film was less boring then The Ring Two, particularly because of how laughable it was, Rings is way less faithful to the American original and that's saying a lot. Now the first thing that this film gets immediately wrong right off the bat is tone. Surprisingly this plane crash sequence is not actually the culmination of events throughout the film. No, it is actually a cold open that never gets referenced again the entire film. It is a scene that is completely independent of everything else that happens in the entire film, and holy fuck are they ever so incredibly impatient right off the bat. None of these characters are developed in the slightest, and the first lines of the film is a guy saying "oh, so I watched this video tape", like these characters clearly only exist to die. This short scene also feels like kind of a ripoff of the opening sketch from Wild Tales. One guy's like "Wow, I saw that video exactly a week ago" and somebody else is like "Oh, me too I also saw that video exactly one week ago" and then when shit starts going down on the plane they essentially use the World War Z soundtrack. I'm sorry, but at what point did you decide that stock action music would be appropriate for a sequel to The Ring? Part of what made the original so scary is that it was creepy and ominous, and the soundtrack complimented that very well. But right off the bat with this film we are treated to a scene where the soundtrack is nothing more then "duh duh deh duh duh deh duh da duh da" This film is incredibly impatient in many ways and its blatantly evident that it doesn't give a shit about what it's showing. The first time we see someone watch the video tape the phone rings and Samara is like "Seven days" and the guy's just like "What, ok, thanks bye." and he immediately starts tripping the fuck out. Part of what made the tension in the first film so effective is there was essentially a countdown timer to the events in the film. Barely anything happens on Day 1, but as the film progresses it gets exponentially more terrifying. Believe it or not, this film does nothing of the sort. By the end of the movie, I couldn't tell if it had been seven days or three. All they would've had to do was just add some titles. She kinda just dicked around the whole movie and nothing really mattered. All of the actor's performances were terrible with the main girl being particularly bad. Her line delivery is so awkward and unnatural that I was having a serious debate in my head over whether or not she had a learning disability. "Last night I watched this video. There was this girl trapped in a well. The second it was over, my phone rang." Turns out she's from Italy and it seems as though she didn't even learn English before the filming started. Like, maybe they just gave her a phonetic version of the script. The plot to this film is unnecessarily stupid and confusing. She can't get a hold of her boyfriend for some time so she goes to whatever college class he's supposed to be in and he's not there. So she follows the professor up an elevator to the seventh floor of this college campus and I shit you not, there is a secret society cult based around the video tape that the professor had created. He's apparently trying to prove that spirits are real with the video tape, and he used the Double-slit experiment as some kind of evidence that he's on the right track and so there's all these people with countdown timers of how much time they have left to copy the video tape and show it to somebody else but instead of anybody just doing that, for some reason they trust the professor to line someone up for them. There's people in the movie that die the most extremely preventable deaths. Like, all you had to do was not wait until the last half an hour to get this shit sorted out. Right after this girl dies, some dude shows up and is like "oh yeah, so uh, I-I don't know what I'm doing here but the professor told me to show up I'm supposed to watch some video file or something?" Why was this not done on any of the six days before? And then her boyfriend gives her the shittiest excuse ever, like "oh no, the only reason that I haven't been returning any of your calls or text messages is because I wanted to-to keep you safe from this ring shit. I didn't want you to accidentally watch this video file." In what way does answering your phone or responding to her texts somehow make her at risk for accidentally watching this video file? You don't even have to fucking tell her about it, you know. So the boyfriend just goes to bed and falls asleep despite only having 12 hours left on his fucking clock. How did you let it get to this point? Why aren't you trying to do anything about this? So while he's sleeping, the girlfriend goes on the laptop and then watches it herself. She's like "Haha, you'll never get him. I'm going to be noble and save your life." Also, this is the least skeptical girl on the fucking planet. Like you haven't even really seen any evidence to believe any of this shit but you just don't question it at all, what the fuck? So after she watches it, the phone rings and she burns her hand and then she has a mark on her hand, and in Trailer 1 it very clearly gives away what the mark means. "This mark on your hand, it says rebirth." But somehow the entire film treats it as though it's a twist at the end? Like, it's supposed to be some massive scary revelation that it says rebirth and the end of the movie is her basically getting possessed by Samara. Like this whole scene in the bathroom is literally the end of the movie. Come to think of it, this is one of the most dishonest trailers for a film I've ever seen in my entire life. Like whoever edited the trailer clearly understood that pointing attention to whatever day it is is kind of an integral part of the story or at least it should be. Does the way that this is edited not kind of imply that the film would be doing something similar? This whole scene with the email also chain never really happens. It's kind of something that happens at the end of the film and it's implied that the video is sent to a bunch of other people, but the trailer implies that that was how the plot was set up? Like, this shot's not in the movie. This never happens in the movie. This never happens in the movie! This part doesn't happen in the movie! And this never happens in the movie either! What the hell, man? Was I just so bored and uninvested that I forgot that these things even happened? I know for a fucking fact that this shit never happened because I was kind of waiting for it to happen. One of the new shots from the video tape is basically the same thing without her in it and by the end of the movie I was like "Why did they even have that there if it never actually came into play at all?" All of the new footage that showed up in the video tape was fucking pathetic compared to what Gore Verbinski filmed. Basically when our main character is finished watching the video tape she tries to make a copy but she can't because it's a larger file size then it was before? They didn't even imply that the hard drive was full and was just like "Oh, we-n-w-we can't copy this because it's a-it's a larger file size then it was before." and that kind of acts like a plot device I guess because now if she can't copy the v-the video file then she has to, uh, figure shit out, uh, before she dies? But later in the movie she's watching the video on her phone. Is she streaming it from her computer? Is that not technically a form of copying that would be perfectly acceptable in terms of showing a new victim the footage? There's a scene in the film that is so fucking funny that it makes the entire movie. Our main character sits in the passenger seat of a vehicle while her boyfriend's driving and the car is going pretty fast and as soon as they exit a tunnel a bird hits the windshield. Our main character freaks out in the passenger seat and the boyfriend stops the vehicle and he's like "Woah, what just happened?" She's like "I saw a bird" and he's like "There's no bird" and you look at the windshield and there's no marks on it, there's-it's not cracked like she saw it. It's very clearly a part of her hallucination, but she's so insistent that she needs to prove that it wasn't So without saying anything, she quickly exits the vehicle, becoming a major hazard on this road Until she sees her hallucination bird on the ground and she points at it and she says "See, I told you there was a bird!" and then almost gets hit by a huge truck. Like, first of all, why was it that important that you needed to exit your vehicle just so you can point at this bird and say "Look, I told you there was a bird!" and second, even when you pointed at the bird and supposedly proved that it was real, you were still the only one that saw it as you were supposedly proving its existence. It was just so ridiculous that I was holding back laughter as hard as I could. What the hell was that? Then she spends most of the movie just kind of dicking around and pretending like she's learning anything There's no real sense of mystery, there's no real sense of tension, there's no real sense of danger... Honestly, she figures out the whole mystery thing pretty quick. By the time it was evident that the movie was wrapping up I was like "oh-what, really? It d-It doesn't feel like anything has happened." There's this scene where she's fighting the blind guy and she drops her phone but the phone has the video playing on it and I was secretly hoping that a miniaturized version of Samara would come out of the phone and it almost fucking happened but a bunch of cicadas swarmed around it and it-it-it made it so it was a normal sized version. This movie is filled with a bunch of stupid bullshit, it doesn't make any sense, there's jumpscares... There's a shot where Samara shows up behind the main character but the main character never notices her like she turns around and she's not there but the main character like never even knew so who was that for? If you're a ghost and you want to spook someone why would you disappear before they could see you? Why would you appear at all? I guess Samara was just trying to spook the audience? Anyway, that about sums up my feelings on this turd. Can you watch this movie and enjoy it as a comedy? Definitely. There is a lot of stupid bullshit that I did not even mention because it would be a waste of time. This movie was bad and you should feel bad, and I'm giving this one a 2/10. Woah, hey guys, I just wanted to say, you should check out my gaming channel, it's pretty sweet, there's a link right there, please check it out, that would be great, thank you, here's a clip: WAKE UP ljafdlsjflskdsdjlfas MAKE UP LKFSJFASLFKASFLJ TAKE UP LFKJFJALFSKDLKJSF TABLE LKJAFJALKSFLKAJSFL FABLE, you wanted to. ??? Mark: I don't think you trust. <Mark and Adam laughing> Adam: Rat trap.
It really is too bad this one sucked, and most of us could see it from a mile away that it was a cash grab, because Verbinski's The Ring was terrifying and well made. The cinematography and sound design was especially stand out and Naomi Watts put in a memorable performance along with a solid supporting cast. The Ring 2 was even decent comparatively.
Oh man, Wild Tales is so damn good. That opening section he mentioned is excellent.
Too bad I was looking forward to it.
A shame. I was really looking forwards to rings