Buy it... the 2005 commercial album if you already own one of the bootlegs and finally want to hear the ideas from The Ring in outstanding sound quality.

Avoid it... if the 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 sequel score for you.

Zimmer

The Ring/The Ring Two: (Hans Zimmer/Jim Dooley/Henning Lohner/Martin Tillman) It all began with Koji Suzuki's popular novel in Japan, featuring a metaphorical horror story that involves a cursed video tape that, upon being viewed, begins a seven-day countdown to that viewer's death. It's one of those classic urban legend concepts, and one that involves more of a 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 movies, and a TV series. The interpretation of the legend in American cinema was inevitable, and Fear Dot Com somewhat borrowed 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, stating that its plot had been incoherent because of 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 film launched it to success. Three years later, and with a new director at the helm, the inevitable sequel takes the surviving primary characters from Seattle to Astoria, Oregon, where a fresh new curse predictably begins all over again. With his career never establishing the horror genre to any great extent during its earlier half, composer Hans Zimmer saw The Ring as an opportunity to branch out into the realm of musical horror master Christopher Young. It would be a project that would share a basic genre with Hannibal, for which Zimmer co-wrote a very popular score, but those two scores could not be further from each other in style. Whereas Hannibal was a horror score based on beauty, intelligence, and elegance, The Ring requires nothing so complex.

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 music. 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 pieces. The bulk of music 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 borders on the troubled, with the two highlighted instruments performing subtle, meandering motifs with a harp. Zimmer very slowly builds his thematic material in The Ring, and between the piano and violin, it takes nearly the entire length of the score to realize where that rather unceremonious theme is leading. A small, accompanying ensemble of strings, perhaps a synth or two, and various percussion present an adequately tense, though occasionally uninteresting base for the score. The synths employ distortion in their samples, and 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, with their often disjointed performances representing the true horror of The Ring. Almost never performing 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.

The score for The Ring doesn't really sustain itself as well outside of the context of the film, providing some intriguing ideas for Zimmer fans to consider, but not maintaining itself as a solid listening experience, as many Christopher Young horror scores do. The end credits do finally condense all of the best ideas from the score into one very impressive suite, and the long-awaited development of these ideas in that eight-minute cue save the score from mediocrity. Zimmer even throws a dying, young girl's vocal at the end of this suite, playing to the expected psyche of the cult. For the purposes of The Ring Two, Zimmer, Lohner, and Tillman would tackle the sequel 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 score. With a fuller sound to the string orchestra (the violence of their performances are easier to appreciate in this recording), the reprise appearances of themes from the first film have more beef in instrumental substance, although the structure 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 Ring Two will likely not interest you. 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 between the two pictures, the electric guitar, percussion, and other basic band elements cheapen the score by turning it into a rock-laced attempt at "coolness." With 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, are extreme disappointments. In some cases, they take base orchestral performances heard elsewhere in the films and overlay blasting guitars and modern percussive rhythms that all but ruin the listening experiences established by the previous material.

Despite the success of the film, as well as the marketability of Hans Zimmer after Gladiator, no record label picked up the rights to The Ring for an album release. Various wild reasons for this absence have flown about over the past three years, including an odd, unconfirmed report that Zimmer himself was unhappy with the outcome of the project. As expected, the lack of an album for The Ring created an uproar with Zimmer 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 which 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 released 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 exists. At any rate, this music was quickly taken off the website by fans and pressed onto the original "promo/bootleg." It was then filtered out by other fans 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 the Media Ventures group often has a way of finding itself onto the secondary market, with the group perhaps existing as the most easily bootlegged ensemble of artists in the film music industry today, so the fact that several different versions of The Ring are now wandering about the secondary market should come as no surprise to Zimmer, the studio, or anyone else. So often are digital versions of their complete scores 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.

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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, a nine-track, 33-minute bootleg was circulating. Still, more material from the film was missing from the album, and a ten-track, 38-minute bootleg then appeared in late 2003. This second bootleg maintained similar packaging, but included several short cues from the film's DVD edited (without sound effects or dialogue, but often with abrupt cuts) into a five-minute suite. For nearly all collectors, the original eight-track "promo" of The Ring would have sufficed, because the end credits cue that appears on all of them includes the best of the material from the film. When The Ring Two entered the scene in 2005, Universal decided that the time was finally right to release both the original and sequel score together. With so much material shared between the two scores, it's easy to see why they decided to do it. The 2005 Decca album would be the first commercial release of music from either film, and for collectors of the bootlegs from the first score, this commercial album features a strong arrangement of music in significantly clearer sound quality. In fact, the improved sound quality alone is worth the purchase price for most Zimmer die-hards. The problem is, however, that the 2005 album does not differentiate between music from The Ring and original performances from 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 Ring Two was being prepared. Whether much of the music for The Ring is simply tracked in to 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. Overall, the mass hysteria over this music never made much sense, because The Ring, as functional and occasionally interesting as it may be, is not much more than a very typical horror underscore. If you can forget for a moment that The Ring was a Zimmer work, and 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... The Ring Two is a combination of rehash and remix that further muddies the waters.

All Pre-2005 Albums for The Ring: **
2005 Album for The Ring and The Ring Two: **
Overall: **

Bias Check:

For Hans Zimmer reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.96 (in 50 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.23 (in 217,535 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.