Send It Back Into the Well It Crawled Out of

Some movies can be so exceptionally well made, so beautifully filmed, and so captivatingly creepy that they disengage us from the fact that nothing in the movie is actually worth spending the time to watch it. The Ring is one such film. After all the seat-grabbing scenes and jump-and-scream moments, we stand, leave the theater, and pretty much forget all about it. The Ring does not deserve to be considered as one of the best suspense-ghost story movies ever made because, of its gaping plot holes that overflow with frustratingly unanswered questions and contradicting facts, lack of consistently escalating intensity and suspense, and waste of its creative potential.

In order to keep its audience engaged and captivated, a superior suspense-ghost story should reveal a story that follows some form of logic and cunningly fills in its plot holes. The biggest and most unsettling problem I had with The Ring is that it fails it validate several of the key questions it invokes, many of which should not have even been raised in the first place. It is like anxiously sitting down to put together a five-hundred piece jigsaw puzzle only to find out two hours later that it is missing over a hundred

A good suspense-ghost story movie would not waste or fail to explore its creative potential. The final and most dissatisfying reason I believe that The Ring does not deserve to be considered as one of the best suspense-ghost story movies ever made is the overall waste of its ground-breaking potential. Although I must commend Verbinski on his keen perception of the underling elements that make suspense-ghost story truly chilling, he fails to utilize the full creative potential that he must have in order to recognize those elements in the first place. His keen perception brings to life the wonderful symbolic and captivating spirit of the story; a super creepy, but somehow believable, villain; and some truly gripping and horrifying, but not gory, moments, but he falls short of creating what could be a truly terrifying ghost story by crudely piecing it together with what are obviously rudiments of some quite popular and recent films. This totally undermines the refreshingly original premise of the film and causes viewers to turn up their noses and regurgitate images of past films. Verbinski even goes as far as to mold some of the characters into one-sided knock-offs of some very memorable performances. The film’s most obvious copycat character is Aidan, Rachael’s emotionally detached son who communicates with dead people. Well, viewers will not have to use their Sixth Sense to figure out where his character originated. Verbinski tries too hard to follow in the steps of his predecessors instead of looking deep within himself to find his own creativity and direction. Sadly, his lack of originality can be seen in some of what could have been the best scenes in The Ring. In the opening scene, for example, viewers sit back reminiscing and just waiting for Kate (the first victim) to Scream 1,2,and 3 times. There is the scene where the profile of an obviously Psycho Mr. Morgan can be see from the side window of the old farmhouse. Viewers quickly get the feeling that Verbinski is trying to hard to mimic the success of such movies as The Others, Sixth Sense, and Stir of Echoes instead of following his own direction and artistic abilities. . . ….. Consequently, The Ring amounts to nothing more than a jumbled mess of overdone clichés and cheap imitations. What a waste! Claudia Puig, movie critic for USA Today, writes, “At time

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