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 pieces! Many well-known critics have openly commented on the damaging effects that these obvious plot holes have inflicted on this film's creditability. James Berardinelli, movie critic for ReelVeiws, claims that "The Ring takes things too far by leaving about 75% of its questions unanswered. [ It] is an incoherent mess, and the more you reflect upon it, the less credible it becomes- (5). The worst of these missing pieces is enclosed in the huge plot hole surrounding Samara (the creepy ghost child). Twice in the movie even her birth is contradicted. First, we are led to believe that she was adopted overseas and later medical records indicate that Mrs. Morgan (her mother) was impregnated with her, and that is only one of the numerously baffling plot holes that engulf this movie.
