RINGS

My suspension of disbelief did not have a good time watching the interstate pile-up that was Rings last night. An overcomplicated, overly-convoluted, plot-hole ridden mess, the film picks up twelve years after the heyday of the original, on-board an airplane where one of Samara’s victims is counting down his own demise. It would’ve been a great opening too, with questions like: do other people see the ghost girl when she crawls out of monitors? Do they die as well when they see her? Does the entire plane crash due to the supernatural hijinks? What kind of an effect would this have on the insurance/airline agents investigating the crash? Those questions are officially filed under “damned if I know”. The filmmakers decided to cut away to the opening credits and move onto some other nonsense before the really interesting stuff could actually begin.

And that kind of sums up everything about the movie. It’s like the movie was made by a committee suffering from ADHD. Several plots are set up with none of them specifically resolved. There’s a theme statement that evokes the Orpheus myth, but no great sacrifice or burden to ‘look back’ is followed through with. There’s a campus experiment of students analyzing the cause and effect of watching Samara’s tape, essentially teasing and irritating our boogeyman (boogeywoman?), but it’s dropped almost as soon as we discover it. There’s a long — way too long — section where we have to learn the mysteries of Samara’s true origin and the sins of her parents’ pasts. And lastly, we learn that everything that came before actually means nothing at all: it was all just a prelude to what the Creepy Ghost Girl really wanted all this time. Pass if you can.