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FILMTRACKS.COM
PRINTER-FRIENDLY VIEW 
Review of The Ring/The Ring Two (Hans Zimmer/Various)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... on the adequate 2005 combination album for a decent
summary presentation of the largely subdued, ambient ideas from both
The Ring and The Ring Two.
Avoid it... if the rather mundane suspense music for the original film didn't float your boat and you have no need to hear a modern band, led by electric guitar, define the new material written for the sequel score.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
The Ring/The Ring Two: (Hans Zimmer/Various)
The hysteria revolving around the mid-2000's franchise of The
Ring all began with Koji Suzuki's popular novel in Japan, featuring
a metaphorical horror story that warns of a cursed video tape that, upon
being viewed, begins a seven-day countdown to that viewer's death. It's
one of those classic, ridiculous urban legend concepts that has
cinematic legs, and one that builds upon a foundation of supernatural
menace rather than the usual slasher-related horror tales. In Japan, the
story was translated to the big screen in the 1998 hit film
Ringu, and its popularity led to a subsequent series of novels,
three subsequent movies, and a TV series. An interpretation of the
legend in American cinema was inevitable, and Fear Dot Com
somewhat borrowed from the same concept while The Ring finally
adapted the original idea in 2002. Followers of the Japanese originals
criticized director Gore Verbinski's American version immediately,
stating that its plot had been made incoherent because of the
filmmakers' attempts to condense the best ideas from the growing legend
into one film. For susceptible American viewers, however, the fresh
urban legend and a well-performed and executed product launched it to
box office success. Three years later, and with a new director at the
helm, the inevitable sequel moves the surviving primary characters from
the original setting of Seattle to Astoria, Oregon, where a fresh new
curse predictably begins another round of killings all over again in
The Ring Two. With his career never establishing the horror genre
to any great extent during its earlier years, composer Hans Zimmer, who
was an affordable option for this movie given his position within
DreamWorks, saw The Ring as an opportunity to branch out into the
realm of musical horror master Christopher Young. It was a project that
would share a basic genre with Hannibal, for which Zimmer
co-wrote a very popular, classically-inclined score, but these two genre
entries for the composer could not be further from each other in style.
Whereas Hannibal is a horror score based on beauty, intelligence,
and elegance, The Ring clearly required nothing so dynamically
thoughtful.
Both The Ring and The Ring Two prey upon primordial emotions, like any good urban legend flick, and thus the scores required a very simple, atmospheric approach in their tone and structures. With additional material written by Jim Dooley, Henning Lohner, and Martin Tillman, a small orchestral ensemble and a few soloists comprise the performers in both works. The bulk of music in The Ring is constructed from a base ensemble of a piano, a violin, and two cellos. The piano and violin offer the plain, purposely underdeveloped sensibilities of the story's primary character, her care for her family, and her investigative instincts. There are significant cues, including the lengthy "Floating Minds," consisting of contemplative underscore that yields merely troubled dissonance, with the two highlighted instruments performing subtle, meandering motifs alongside a harp and celeste. Zimmer very slowly introduces and develops his thematic material in The Ring, and between elusive statements on mainly the piano and violin, it takes nearly the entire length of the score to realize where that rather unceremonious, descending lullaby for the main character is leading. Most obvious when on piano, the lullaby has potential in its slight waltz sensibilities but never really defines the score. A small, accompanying ensemble of strings, synthetic accents, and various percussion present an adequately tense, though occasionally uninteresting base environment via skittish pairs of descending notes. The synthesizers employ a fair amount of unsettling distortion in their contribution, and Zimmer cannot refrain from sudden drop-offs and manipulation techniques as a cheap scare tactic. The string section often reacts much the same way, raising tension by simply using themselves as one combined sound effect whether by screeching, whining, or striking. Most listeners will recognize the two cellos, performed by Martin Tillmann and Anthony Pleeth, to be the heart and soul of the score, their typically disjointed performances representing the true horror element in The Ring. Almost never stating the same motif or theme in unison, the two cellos play well off of each other in order to create a unique method of confusing and frightening the audience. Consider it a twisted form of instrumental taunting with subtle jabs at the listener that never coalesce into a full expression of dread, guilt, or outright fright in the ways you'd expect for an entry in this genre. By its end, the score for The Ring doesn't really sustain its appeal very well outside of the context of the film, providing some intriguing ideas for enthusiasts of Zimmer and his crew to consider but not expressing its ideas in such a form as to define itself as a solid listening experience, as many Christopher Young horror scores do. The end credits do finally condense all of the best lyrical structures from the score, highlighted by the lullaby and related, descending motifs of dread, into one surprisingly engaging and impressive suite, and the long-awaited development of these ideas in that eight-minute track saves the score from total mediocrity. Zimmer even throws a dying, young girl's vocal at the end of a fuller, alternate suite arrangement, playing to the expected psyche of the cult. Had this more painful and mysterious lyrical element been applied with obvious care in the score, its ethos would have been far more effective. For the purposes of The Ring Two, Lohner and Tillman primarily tackled the sequel using Zimmer material in two strikingly different and arguably very ineffective ways. The first idea in the score seems to involve a simple expansion of the sound in the previous entry. With a fuller breadth to the string orchestra (the sense of heightened violence of their performances is easier to appreciate in this recording), the reprised appearances of themes from the first film have more beef in instrumental substance, although the rather stale structures will be highly familiar and perhaps disappointing to fans of the original score. If you heard nothing distinctly original or compelling in The Ring, then the rehash of ideas in the derivative half of The Ring Two will likely not interest you, either. The other, more curious part of The Ring Two is the mass-electrification of four cues for the film. Sharing little in continuity with the other music existing between the two pictures, the electric guitar, percussion, and other basic pop band elements cheapen the score by turning it into a rock-laced attempt at coolness in an otherwise atmospheric domain. With compositional credit pointing to Tillman, the two final cues from The Ring Two, as well as the two remixes that appear at the end of the commercial compilation album containing both scores, are extreme disappointments. In some cases, they take the orchestral performances heard elsewhere in the films and overlay blasting guitars and modern percussive rhythms that all but ruin the listening experience established by the previous material. Despite the success of the film, as well as the marketability of Zimmer's name in the years just after Gladiator, no record label picked up the rights to The Ring and pressed an album release up front. A variety of wild reasons for this circumstance flew about over subsequent years, including an unconfirmed report that Zimmer himself was unhappy with the outcome of the project and blocked a possible album. As expected, the lack of availability for The Ring created an uproar with Zimmer and associated Media Ventures/Remote Control collectors who had become accustomed to hearing all of his scores on album. Desperate fans, however, were treated to a "promotional" release of The Ring not long after the film's debut that included about 25 minutes of the score. The only reason this "TIL Music Group" album even has the term "promotional" associated with it is because much of the music in its contents was voluntarily streamed on the website of one of the associated composers (Dooley), thus blurring the lines in whether the intent of the music leak was for promotional purposes, or, in the worst of cases, out of spite for the fact that no commercial album existed. At any rate, this music was quickly taken off the website by fans and pressed onto the original "promotional bootleg." It was then filtered out by others almost immediately after the realization that no commercial album would exist for the score, and, as to be expected, a few bootlegged versions were created for those who wanted to scrounge around and add even more music from the film. Music produced by Zimmer and his production house often had a way of finding itself leaked onto the secondary market at the time, with the group perhaps existing as the most easily bootlegged ensemble of artists in the contemporary film music industry, so the fact that several different versions of bootlegs based on The Ring were wandering about the secondary market quite quickly (and eventually including the complete sessions) should come as no surprise to Zimmer, his army of assistants, the studio, or anyone else. So often are digital versions of their recording sessions leaving the front doors of their studios that you have to wonder if such mass bootlegging of their music concerns them to any extent at all. For The Ring, the original "TIL Music Group" album had eight cues based on the first leak of the music, and before too long, a fan-created suite had been added to the end (essentially just an edit of the ideas heard in the original end credits, without the girl's vocals) and, with new artwork, the common nine-track, 33-minute bootleg was born. Still, more material from the film was missing from the initial rounds of bootlegs for The Ring, and a ten-track, 38-minute alternative then appeared in late 2003. This second bootleg maintained similar packaging but included several short cues from the film's DVD edited rather poorly into a five-minute suite. For nearly all collectors, the original eight-track "promo" of The Ring would have sufficed, because the end credits on all the bootlegs was the only required highlight. When The Ring Two entered the scene in 2005, Universal decided to finally release both the original and sequel scores together on one CD, which made clear sense given the material shared between the two scores. The 2005 Decca album was the first commercial release of music from either film, and for those seeking the first score, this commercial product features a strong arrangement of music in significantly clearer sound. In fact, the improved sound quality alone was worth the purchase price for most listeners. The problem with the 2005 album, however, has always been that it does not differentiate between music dedicated to The Ring and original performances for The Ring Two, leading you to believe that there may have been a significant "cut and paste" operation in progress when the score for the sequel was being prepared. Regardless of the tracking of existing music into The Ring Two, the final four highly synthetic and pop-culture remix cues on this album are definitely new, and, as discussed above, they all but ruin the listening experience. Enthusiasts of the concept were treated to a significant expansion of The Ring in 2022, with 56 minutes of the full score presentation supplemented by 41 minutes of alternate and unused cues. The arrangement of this 2CD set from La-La Land Records is a bit odd, however, the first CD containing what appears to be Zimmer's preferred album experience, relegating actual film versions of several cues to the second CD. It's one of the rare circumstances in which the second CD of bonus material is actually more attractive than the primary film presentation, the first three alternate tracks offering the best 14 minutes of essential listening from the work. Even with this improved 2022 presentation, the mass hysteria over this music still doesn't make much sense, because The Ring, as functional and occasionally interesting as it may be, offers not much more than very typical ambient suspense. If you can forget for a moment that The Ring is a Zimmer work and realize that the film's cult status has instead caused all the interest, then you may discover that the score is average at best and unsettling at its worst, while The Ring Two is a combination of rehash and remix that further muddies the waters.
TRACK LISTINGS:
TIL "Promotional" Album:
Total Time: 25:06
Bootleg #1: Total Time: 33:08
Bootleg #2: Total Time: 37:44
2005 Decca/Universal: Total Time: 63:11
2022 La-La Land Album: Total Time: 97:26
* not used in the film ** contains material not used in the film
NOTES & QUOTES:
None of the 2002-2005 albums (promotional, bootleg, or commercial) includes
any extra information about the score or film. That of the 2022 La-La Land set contains
extensive notation about both.
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The reviews and other textual content contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Christian Clemmensen at Filmtracks Publications. All artwork and sound clips from The Ring/The Ring Two are Copyright © 2002, 2003, 2005, 2022, TIL Music Group (Promotional/Bootleg), Bootlegs, Decca/Universal, La-La Land Records and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 10/16/03 and last updated 11/9/22. |
