Over the last few weeks or so I watched 4 movies in the Ring series, all without subtitles: リング, らせん,リング２, and リング0 バースデイ
Ring is great! A classic! It’s restrained and slow-paced in a way that deeply confused me when I first saw it in like, middle school, but now I appreciate a whole lot. It sets up the simple premise - there’s a VHS tape and if you watch it, you’ll die in exactly 1 week - and then just lets the atmosphere breathe and slowly build up in a really effective way, with most of the “action” being like, research and investigative journalism.
In a very weird situation, apparently the sequel, Spiral, was produced and released at exactly the same time as Ring, led by a different director, apparently to capitalize off of the original book versions of both already being successful. So Spiral just does its own thing not knowing yet that the other movie is going to be famous and influential - and comes out looking terrible for the comparison.
Spiral doesn’t have Ring’s restraint and simplicity at all. I honestly get the impression that this is a much more direct adaptation of the novel and suspect in retrospect Ring the book is probably similar to Spiral tonally, because the movie’s full of the kinds of things a successful male horror novelist might over-indulge in in a novel - there’s a ton of time spent on an older man’s sexual relationship with a female student, the ghost Sadako is portrayed as a seductress somehow, instead of a straightforward curse the video tape is presented as a harbinger of some kind of techno virus inexorably taking over the world, there’s a mystical pregnancy and reincarnation angle, previous characters come back as ghosts with mysterious motives, etc.
It’s just kind of a mess. At first I was willing to go along with it as a weird thing but by the end I was very much over it.
Ring 2 ignores Spiral and has the same director and screenwriter as Ring, and maybe it’s the juxtaposition with Spiral, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. With horror sequels, I figure the most you can really expect is like, a relatively consistent aesthetic and level of quality and a plot that makes up for the lack of novelty by just going a bit weirder. And this is pretty much that.
It takes similar developments from Spiral (developing the student from the first movie into a protagonist, characters trying to investigate the video tape’s curse scientifically) but adapts them with the same level of restraint as the first movie (and thankfully avoids all but entirely the creepy romance angle), and generally I thought does a good job matching the tone of the original while doing its own weird thing. The scene where the ghost reenacts the video tape scenes, including the camera cuts in an eerie way, and the climactic pool scene I thought were both very cool.
And finally Ring 0 is an unremarkable prequel - it’s fine, and it’s sort of nice to fill in Sadako the plot device with an actual character… but really, I think the less you know in detail about a spooky video tape the more spooky it is, you know? It’s not really something that needs a full-on backstory.
Comprehension-wise, I think I did okay! Not great, but okay. I didn’t follow all of Spiral’s plot contrivances without looking up a synopsis, and there was a reveal in Ring 2 that I think would have been less shocking to me if I’d followed prior dialogue correctly and not been mistaken about who was alive and who wasn’t at that point, but for the most part I feel like I got the gists at least. Having seen the first movie before (technically twice) certainly helped with that one…