Rings Falls Short of its Predecessor

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Starring Matilda Ingrid Lutz and Alex Roe, F. Javier Gutiérrez’s Rings is nothing compared to its 2002 and 2005 predecessor.

 

When The Ring came out in 2002, it was a hit, earning $249.3 million in the box office.. The Ring Two, which came out in 2005 was also successful, earning $161.5 million from a budget of $50 million dollars. However, it was not popular, receiving a 20% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 44/100 on Metacritic.

At this point, most movie makers would surmise that the franchise should be cut off, as to leave it on a not-awful note.

However, F. Javier Gutiérrez is apparently not like most people.

Rings is flawed from the beginning to finish. Throughout the movie, there were questions that went unanswered that should have been answered, actions committed by the characters didn’t make sense and the acting was terrible in some places.

If you’ve seen The Ring, you should have a pretty good idea of what goes on in this movie. If you watch a certain video, you will die within a week.

In Rings a twist is added: if you get someone else to watch the video, the “curse” ends for you and moves on to the person you got to watch the video. In the movie this is called your “tail”.

After this sentence, I’m going to spoil some things, so if you still want to see it, don’t read past here until the next bold text.

In the movie, a girl’s boyfriend watches the video while at college. He stops texting or responding to her calls, so she goes to his university to find him. When they find each other, the boyfriend spills the beans on what happened.

Then the girl, whose name is Julia, watches the video so that her boyfriend won’t die. She then starts having visions that tell her where to go to supposedly break the curse. The two follow these “visions” which lead them to an area called Sacrament Valley, where they find where the “spirit” of the girl who is going to kill them.

The characters then spend the next forty minutes doing nothing special until they find the guy who apparently killed the girl that would go on to haunt people with the video. The girl then kills the guy who killed her and Julia burns the girls physical remains in order to “free her spirit”.

End of spoilers.

Prior to the main story is probably one of the worst-acted scenes of any movie I’ve seen. In the beginning, a man is sitting on an airplane and he can’t relax. The girl sitting next to him says something along the lines of “I’ve heard that talking can help.” He buys into this, and his idea of a conversation starter is “Have you heard of the video that kills you if you watch it?” This comes out of nowhere, and no actual person would start a conversation that way. It feels as though the makers of the film were attempting to shoehorn the video into the movie as soon as possible with no regard to flow.

They easily could’ve had him have a nosebleed or some physical ailment and the girl could have asked “Hey, are you alright?” and then the guy could say “I watched some video last weekend and this girl called me and said ‘seven days’. I looked into it and apparently that means that you die in a week if you’ve seen this video.” He would still seem like a nutcase to the girl, but at least the flow of the movie would be better.

As I said earlier, the movie leaves several key questions unanswered. One question I had was “why couldn’t you just use the person you just ‘tailed’ as a tail?” That way, the two people could just watch the video once a week and be perfectly fine. I would’ve been fine if that wasn’t possible in the world of The Rings if they had explained it, but they never did.

In short, I would definitely not recommend that you watch Rings, unless you have two hours to kill and are in the mood to see bad acting, bad writing and a rehashed story.

 

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