From: (No Email available)

Date: 2003-02-14 09:12:57

Comment:

I know everyone has a ton of questions about this flick.  That's part of the fun: the film leaves you speculating, and you can explore possible scenarios and you feel like you're tapping into the warped mind that is this movie and finding things in there that you have not actually been directly shown.  And you're getting closer to the source of the horror than you were taken....  ooo-eeeerr..  That's great!

Anyway, here are my top nit-picking unanswered questions from a continuity/plausibility point of view:

-- Were the four kids that saw the video in Shelter Mountain Inn the first ones to see the video?  It doesn?t seem likely because Katie?s friend Becca already knows the ?urban myth? of the video before any of them have been killed, and a guy at Katie?s funeral knows about the tape too. But we see Katie telling Becca that they had used the videotape to record a football game on, and they got the Samara nightmare instead.  So it sort-of sounds like the tape was created by them doing this.  
-- We are led to believe that Aidan has drawn pictures of Katie buried underground the week before she died; as though he could predict the future.  But later in bed he suggests to Rachel that Katie had told him she did not have enough time, and that he interpreted this as meaning that she was going to die.  So if this was why he drew the pictures, it?s no longer so remarkable, but Rachel does not pick this up, or appear very interested.  Furthermore, if Katie has told him she is going to die, why does she keep this quiet from everyone else?  In the opening scene with her and Becca, she is apparently not too worried about death until Becca recounts the urban myth to her; and this reminds her that she saw the video and got the 7 days call exactly seven days ago.  But if she?s told her young cousin the previous week that she was going to die soon, would she really have forgotten about this as the deadline (pun intended) crept up?  What?s even stranger is that she is capable of winding Becca up with her faked death right before she dies for real, and right after having received Becca?s corroboration that the ?video that kills? story is something true.
-- Why aren?t we given more of a hint of what it was like for Becca to witness Katie?s death, or find her dead or whatever?  Evidently she does see something, even if it?s ?just? Katie?s horribly contorted face on death, and this sends her insane.  It would be really scary to have shown more of this, but we don?t see Becca again after she has answered Katie?s phone, and the next we hear about her is that she?s in a mental institution.  In the post-funeral scene there is a very brief clip where we see what is presumably Katie?s mother finding her dead in a closet (Brilliant ? again this should have been more than just a flash-frame).  This must mean that she find?s Becca in her freaked-out state also, but there?s no mention of this.  Katie?s mother wants answers because she finds the medical explanation (heart attack) for Katie?s death implausible ? wouldn?t the scenes she found in the house that night be more of a pointer?  When Rachel finds Noah dead, the TV is still on and there?s water all over the floor.  Had all this disappeared from Katie?s house by the time her mother found her?
-- Why is Becca shielded by a screen when walking down a corridor in the mental institution?  Is it something to do with the TV?  (which would suggest she saw Katie experiencing a Samara-out-of-the-TV style death).  Come to think of it, in Katie?s house doesn?t she (Katie) unplug the self-activating TV, then go to the kitchen to shut the self-opening fridge, and then go to the foot of the stairs to call up to Becca?  And when we next see her she is back upstairs on the landing about to enter a room that is flooding with water and has water on the door handle ? and her mother finds her dead in her own bedroom, so is this the place it happens?  We know there is a TV in her room because the girls are watching it at the start, but how can Becca be in the room with the water.  Can only victime see the water?
-- Since this takes place 24 years after Anna Morgan died, and therefore at least that long since she pushed Samara down the well, why is there no account of anything that happened in the time gap?  Of course, videotape would have scarcely existed at the time of the nasty events in the Morgan household.
-- The other three teenagers? deaths were reported as suicide or car accident and in no way mysterious.  Why?  Is this just (Samara?s) ?luck??  The only way Rachel picks up anything odd is from the coincidence of the times of the deaths (10pm)
-- When Rachel watches the video the very last scene is of the well from outside (or maybe the inside-the-well scene is the final one; doesn?t matter).  But when we see Noah watching the end of it, I?m sure we can see Samara start to climb out of it, which we didn?t see before.  Any ideas?
-- What has Noah?s assistant going into the elevator up to his apartment after he has been killed got to do with anything?  No consequences; no follow-up. Why do Rachel and Noah struggle with each other and the video controls when trying to fine-tune what we later see to be the lighthouse?  Rachel then has to go and do this at her workplace.
-- There is a fly in the video the first time Rachel watches it.  But we later realise that none of this was shot through a camera, but ?projected? from Samara?s thoughts.  We see the fly later when Rachel is trying to isolate the lighthouse image, but this time the fly is real.  I think we see it again one other time and it is within the video image again.  What?s going on here?
-- It seems quite incredible that anyone can survive a fall down a well that looks to be a hundred feet deep and no more than four or five feet wide and has only a few feet of water at the bottom, but Rachel (and Samara) both survive.