The Movie: Ringu is the original Japanese movie that was remade in America as the hugely popular The Ring, and it was quite interesting to see the differences between the two versions, both in the storytelling style, and in terms of what plot points were changed. Of course, Ringu itself is an adaptation from a novel... so the American movie is a remake of a movie based on a book. Ha!

The first part of the film was recreated almost verbatim in the American version, with virtually the same opening sequence, down to the little details. But somewhere in the middle, things change, and the two movies diverge into very different stories. The explanation of the origin of the video and its curse is completely different in the two versions, but in the end, the two stories again start to agree with each other.

One thing that I liked about Ringu over The Ring is that they didn't try to give any hokey technical explanations for what was going on. In fact, they did very little explaining of why things were happening at all, and left a lot more up to the imaginations of the audience than The Ring did. Where The Ring obviously had some supernatural elements to it, it was almost as if they didn't want it to be too supernatural. Ringu just lets itself completely go full tilt into the supernatural realm.

But The Ring I think was much more effective at telling the story in a visual manner, particularly with using visual cues from the video to both foreshadow future events and in revealing key plot points in a visual way rather than telling the audience with dialog as Ringu often did. And it's because of this stylistic difference that I think The Ring is more effective as a film overall.

And of course, the special effects in the American version are a lot fancier, which is to be expected since I'm sure it had a much larger budget. Overall, I'd have to say I enjoyed the American remake better, but there were certain aspects of the Japanese version that I liked, and it's definitely worth seeing if you want to see where the American version started from.

And as a side note, I hope that when I get old, I look as cool as the grumpy old man character in Ringu. I hope to be a very, very grumpy old man. :)

The DVD: This is a very bare-bones disc with no real special features to speak of. The only extras you get are promotional trailers for other DVDs from Dreamworks, such as their DVD release of The Ring, which makes sense, but the inclusion of trailers for Catch Me If You Can and 8 Mile don't seem to make much sense except of course, that they are just trying to sell you more DVDs.

The video transfer is quite clean, with very few compression artifacts, though it does represent a lot of the grain that I'm sure was present in the original film, which I suppose is a positive thing, not a negative one. Colors were somewhat muted (though I suspect that was intentional, though not as extreme as the overt blue tinting of The Ring), but there was a general lack of contrast which I'm not sure was intentional. Shadow detail was good, except for the elevated black level which was the source of that lack of contrast.

The audio (which is in the original Japanese language) was pretty straightforward, clean, with clear dialog. There was quite a bit of panning in the front channels, but it didn't sound smooth, instead, it seemed rather forced. The surround channels didn't see a whole lot of action, but they did see some.

Overall, I guess it's just an okay disc, but the movie is definitely worth checking out if you are a fan of The Ring.