I Can See The Future! Oh, Wait, It's Just A Premonition...

Premonition (Yogen) is an excellent movie based on a comic originally by Jiro Tsunoda. Like Ringu, (which you may know better as "The Ring,") this movie is almost certainly better in its original form than any Americanization of it will turn out to be; this is because American directors just seem to miss the point a lot of the time when reshooting foreign films.

For example, the Tom Cruise movie "Vanilla Sky," which did SO very well in American theaters, is actually a remake of a great film called "Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes)." Now, Abre Los Ojos is a fantastic movie, alternately really creative and very disturbing, and its conclusion will absolutely knock your socks off. Vanilla Sky, on the other hand, sucks. Despite frequently reshooting scenes using what looks like the same sets (they weren't, just very detailed recreations) as the original, all too often the impact of a scene is lost completely when the American director focuses on parts of the scene irrelevant to the story, rather than on the crucial clues shown in the far superior original.
Ringu suffered the same treatment at the hands of director Gore Verbinski, who just plain didn't understand the point of a lot of the scares in the original. Everyone knows kids are creepy, which of course is why we still have them in droves, so I can sort of understand replacing the 18-year-old girl from the original movie with the 8-year-old girl in The Ring (but not really.) However, if you watched The Ring, maybe you remember my favorite scene in the movie: the ghost comes out of the television, and rather than GET TO HIS FEET AND RUN AWAY, like a sensible human, Noah Clay flops around on the floor like a dying fish, allowing the ghost to catch him with ease and kill him. Why, you ask? What sense does this scene make, you ask? Why, after all, DIDN'T he just get up and run away?
Well, because the script demands that he's supposed to die. This is because the character died in the original; however, to understand how profoundly (the American director) missed the point, let me paint you a picture of life in Tokyo. The average bachelor salaried worker, called "sarariman," (say it in a bad Japanese accent if you don't get it on sight,) lives in an apartment smaller than a typical American living room. A small family (husband, wife, 2.5 kids) typically lives in an apartment the size of an American living room with a den. When Sadako (Samara in the American version) comes out of the television in Ringu, Ryuji Takayama is less than 5 feet from the television, with his back to a huge wooden railing which divides his "den" from his "living room." He has nowhere to go; he CANNOT simply leap to his feet and escape. The entire point of the scene is claustrophobia, and a comment on the cramped nature of city life for Japanese, something Gore Verbinski totally failed to understand.
What does all this have to do with Premonition?
Well, I'll tell you.
Premonition is a movie intimately concerned with the nature of fate and destiny, in a way often explored by the Asian cinema, yet often ignored by the West; this is not, in itself, a problem, but I cringe at the thought of this excellent, contemplative little horror movie being remade by hands as callous as those of Gore Verbinski.
Hideki is an associate professor looking for tenure; he is out for a drive with his wife and daughter and stops to phone in some crucial work, when he sees a newspaper clipping in the phone booth that reports a horrible crash that hasn't happened yet - one in which his daughter is killed (picture and all.)
He attempts to save his daughter but fails; a huge truck, whose driver had suffered a heart attack, veers onto the side of the road and crushes their car, daughter and all. His wife, understandably in shock about this disaster, thinks he's crazy when he starts raving about having seen it coming.
Think I'm giving something away? That's the first 3 minutes of the movie. Hideki continues to see "premonitions," and begins to wonder if he can change their outcome, attempting to enlist his (now estranged) wife in his efforts to stymie destiny's plan, much like Final Destination. Unlike Final Destination, however, the consequences of meddling with fate play out in a very different fashion, at one point even placing him (in a vision) in the truck responsible for his daughter's death moments before impact.
This movie speculates about destiny in a way American movies have forgotten, if they ever tried to explore it in the first place, and hopefully it will receive its just respect from audiences in its original form, rather than in a watered-down form deemed acceptable for the obviously painfully stupid American audiences by the Hollywood executives responsible for The Ring and The Ring 2, which was an even greater butchery of a good film than was the original.
Think not? Watch Ringu 2. They left out the single best scene in the film in its entirety - didn't even attempt it. Oh, yeah, and there's a "Ringu 0" also, which comes chronologically before Ringu, and explains how Sadako got dead in the first place. Of course, since they A. explained all that in The Ring, and B. made the girl so young that the story prior to her death is almost irrelevant, I'm not exactly sure what they have planned for the next movie. It will almost certainly have nothing whatsoever to do with the original.
At any rate, Premonition is a first-rate movie, and deserves your attention in its original form; you can get it at most video stores on DVD, and I recommend you try, as it is definitely worth the effort to find it.