Movie Review--The Ring Two (Unrated Edition)

"Evelyn wasn't well.  She had been having problems during the pregnancy: hallucinations, visions.  She believed some thing had come for her baby from the waters of the world beyond this one."

--Nun, The Ring Two

Japanese director Hideo Nakata helmed The Ring Two after he directed the original Japanese film Ring and after the American remake called The Ring was released under a different director.  While neither being a sequel nor having a director of a particular nationality making a movie for an audience halfway across the world by necessity damns a film to fall short of its potential, The Ring Two is by no means as well-crafted as The Ring.  Wooden or halfhearted acting (if some of the cast members cannot do better than this, then they are not cut out for acting), a more generic attempt to explore Samara, and dialogue that neither brings more philosophical weight nor reveals deep characterization all keep The Ring Two mediocre at best.  Not even the usually talented Naomi Watts saves this movie.  As for this review covering the unrated edition, a movie only has to not have an extended cut rated by the MPAA to have an unrated edition, yes, but the unrated version of a horror film is usually supposed to add more explicitly violent or macabre content, and there is no indication from just watching this edition of The Ring Two that anything belonging in these categories was added unless it is only a few second long.

Production Values

There was an (for me) almost surprising lack of effects needed to tell the story of this sequel, though putting the focus on the cast is not something that elevates the movie.  On the contrary, from Emily VanCamp, who became an MCU actress but whose younger self is in The Ring Two, to Naomi Watts herself, the actresses and actors here are mostly bland or needlessly detached in their performances.  With respect to Naomi Watts and how she is so much more expressive and well-realized in something like Peter Jackson's King Kong, Perhaps the difference is because of the respective directorial styles and input of Peter Jackson and Hideo Nakata.  In either case, though King Kong and The Ring Two both came out in 2005 and star Naomi Watts, the latter does not even come close to utilizing her as well.  Unfortunately, it does not utilize its other cast members well either--especially in a film with abysmal to mediocre acting, David Dorfman as Aidan Keller, the son of Naomi Watts' character, is pitiful compared to the child actors of several more modern horror movies like It.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

A young girl named Emily is shown Samara's cursed videotape by a romantic interest desperate to pass on the death sentence before seven days have passed since he watched it, but Emily holds her hands up over her eyes after being told it is the scariest movie of all time.  Rachel Keller and her young son Aidan have moved to escape their traumatic confrontation with Samara, but Rachel sees the face of the boy and momentarily sees Samara grab her.  She enters the house where the death took place, takes the tape linked to Samara out of the VCR, and burns it.  Aidan nonetheless has a nightmare in which Samara emerges from a TV screen to grab him, after which he begins having an aversion to water and seeing Samara.  By burning the tape, Rachel had in a sense released Samara to try to take over Aidan's body to use as her own vessel.

Intellectual Content

In addition to wasting its cast and story, The Ring Two similarly wastes the few more explicitly epistemological or metaphysical issues raised throughout its runtime.  When Rachel is asked if her son's pictures of himself and a mirror that supposedly show Samara (the man asking her has not yet looked at them) prove a ghost is attaching itself to him, she says that "The proof is what will happen."  Of course, future events cannot be proven to be about to happen, as one can only prove that it seems like a specific event will take place out of all the logically possible future occurrences.  Even after such a thing happened, one would not be able to prove that it did occur because there is not a way to prove that one's memory of events is accurate and, more importantly, no event is true by necessity, for only logical axioms, what logically follows from them, and conceptual truths (which are logical truths pertaining to specific concepts beyond just the laws of logic) are inherently true and none of them are events.  Another idea that could have been explored more is a reference to how Samara's mother supposedly feared an afterlife of water and a sea demon affiliated with it--this also is relegated to a single scene, but the lore potential and hypothetical metaphysics held much promise.

Conclusion

Gore Verbinski's The Ring does an admirable job of adapting foreign source material to a Western style while maintaining a PG-13 rating.  The Ring Two loses most of what made the lore of the first one unique and does little to nothing with its characters.  Lead actress Naomi Watts is not at her best, and the script is weak.  Samara herself is both less mysterious (which is not always negative on its own) and far more generic than before.  There is no particular reason for there to actually be a sequel in the first place when the content and execution is so lackluster at best.  Moreover, even the unrated edition of The Ring Two has scarcely anything to make its mark as a horror film, as its horror elements are extremely weak in a thematic and presentational sense, and generic practically the whole way through.  The Ring series only went downhill after the first entry.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  Blood comes out from under a door in one scene, but the majority of the content related to violence is just Samara grabbing a struggling victim or Rachel trying to force Samara underwater to drown her.

 2.  Profanity:  For a movie over two hours long and one that is unrated, there is not much profanity here.  Still, some profanity like a use of "fucking" is used.