Adapting a horror novel to the screen is a task of great difficulty; if you don't believe me, just look at most of the movie versions of Stephen King's works. Horror novels benefit from having an astronomical amount of space to build suspense and develop character, both of which are generally lost when translated into screenplay form. There's not enough time to give the best elements of the book their due, so what you're usually left with is a lot of horrifying sights and little else. More often than not, the movies suffer most when they're taken from page to screen by the original author, since they can't fairly decide what should stay and what should go. It's fitting that Stephen King went apeshit over Scott Smith's sophomore novel, THE RUINS, for like a lot of King's undertakings, it contains a supernatural element terrorizing a small group of desperate people. Given the premise, it's a surprisingly intense and rewarding read, even if it does require a good bit of patience. You could almost say Smith builds anticipation too slowly, but when it finally reveals the main attraction, it was worth the wait. The greatest fear I had for the movie version, aside from the fact it involves vacationing teenagers, is that the book's primary threat could easily come off as cheesy and downright laughable.
Smith is responsible for the screenplay for The Ruins, and while I could label it with having the Stephen King Syndrome, I'm not entirely sure that was the case. Hollywood studios think they know what will sell, so there's a distinct possibility Smith handed in a juicy draft of the script and they tossed it because it didn't focus enough on "the scary parts." I'd be curious to hear how he feels about the finished product; there's a good deal of his original source still intact, but the spectacular mounting dread that was present before has been thrown out and replaced by a need to deliver spectacle and nothing else.
It was a bit disconcerting, since the movie could have feasibly stretched its first half out to make room for the characters' steady decline from hopeful to helpless. They were not heavily developed in the novel, but Smith outlined their personalities enough so we could understand and identify with each person's moments of despair. True, the novel was gruesome, but it was also pretty thick with psychological breakdowns. I sometimes had to wonder if exhaustion and fear weren't responsible for a great deal of the events the movie makes literal.
The movie touches on many of the elements mentioned above, although they become afterthoughts more or less right after they're introduced. The pacing by director Carter Smith (no relation to Scott) is so swift I almost didn't notice the lack of character development until it was over. In a way, the movie's greatest weakness also turns out to be its greatest strength, meaning that if you're going to skimp out on giving us a reason to give a crap about the people in peril, be sure to throw them into it right away.
For the uninformed, the story revolves around two couples who go on a vacation to Mexico shortly before graduating from college. They accept an offer to seek out some Mayan ruins that aren't in any of the tour guides, only to discover upon their arrival that the frightened locals won't allow them to leave. If that wasn't enough, there's something strange going on with the plant life. The scenario of being restrained by others is terrifying enough, and the movie gets some tense mileage out of it. The kids quickly start to brainstorm ways to free themselves of the situation, with results that are less than helpful.
Jeff (Jonathan Tucker) tries to deem himself the leader of the group, hastily offering survival tips that will keep them alive until (hopefully) they are rescued. As things get worse, so do his decisions, since something inhabiting the ruins has powers beyond his control. Sadly, the hazards aside from the worst one are all but forgotten. It's abundantly clear that The Ruins champions piling its crisis situations on top of each other instead of allowing things to unravel slowly. This doesn't turn out to be a completely bad move, due to the fact that each catastrophe is handled in a brutally efficient and often skin crawling manner.
The gore effects on display here are some of the more impressive I have seen in quite some time. I was leery whether or not some of the book's nastier set pieces would make it to the screen, and yet there they are, in glorious detail. If the director Smith excels here, he also does a splendid job establishing an atmosphere of inescapable danger, not just on the ruins but also inside a mine shaft. Before seeing the movie, I was concerned that the CGI used to create the ruins' killer would be too fake to take at face value. Aside from a single moment, I found the visuals to be pretty seamless and undeniably eerie.
At barely ninety minutes, The Ruins hardly feels like it was on for an hour. I'll be curious to see if a Director's Cut surfaces later, as there's a part of me that presumes the writer Smith crafted a screenplay that focused just as much on the inner demons as it did on the outer. That would be quite a movie. Even though I was hoping Smith would be able to bring his novel to the screen with a little more authenticity (even some of its best gross out moments are nowhere to be found and a new ending is a letdown), it's damn near impossible for me to deny the picture's visceral impact. If it's a well oiled machine you're seeking, then you could do a whole lot worse than The Ruins.
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Copyright, Hell and Beyond, 2008
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