I probably went into Carter Smith’s film adaptation of Scott Smith’s (no relation) The Ruins expecting too much. I don’t see how I could have avoided that given just how wonderfully written the novel was. Unless they were to get very lyrical with landscapes and objects and sound, a la No Country for Old Men or There Will Be Blood, there was simply no way the filmmakers could translate the book’s ferociously intense interiority to the screen. (Well, now that I think of it, that was a way, and it was a way they didn’t take.) They made a good movie, don’t get me wrong. If you haven’t read the great novel you might think they made a great movie. I’m not sure.
What they did is rely on the ability of their actors to perform pain, and whenever that was going on they succeeded in a big way. As I’ve said before, the casting of this film was a real coup. Each of the main characters is attractive not in a plastic MTV/CW way, but in a your-girlfriend’s-cute-best-friend or your-good-looking-roommate way. You’re instantly attracted to each not in the way you’re attracted to matinee idols or pin-ups, but to good-natured, presentable people in the prime of their lives. Perhaps that’s why the necessarily truncated intro—which collapses our American foursome’s meeting and befriending of German tourist Matthias and a group of party-hardy Greeks and their subsequent decision to set out to an off-the-map Mayan ruin to track down Matthias’s brother and his newfound archaeologist lady friend from days into literally minutes—doesn’t feel nearly as rushed as it probably ought to. If I bumped into any of these people on vacation, I’d probably go offroading with them too. (Certainly I defy you not to come away from this movie with a crush on Jena Malone, if you’re oriented in that direction.)
The cutting and splicing doesn’t start to hurt until they reach the ruins, where a series of decisions made by the Smiths (Scott wrote the screenplay as well as the novel) in the interest of economizing character and conveying the stakes as quickly as possible upset the complex, nuanced interplay that made the novel such a pleasurably unpleasant read. (I’m about to SPOIL THE HELL OUT OF THIS MOVIE, so be warned.) Instead of putting two and two together regarding how much business the Mayan guards mean via the discovery of the body of Matthias’s brother, the movie gets the point across by having the Mayans kill the Greek right away. With him down, it’s left to Matthias to become the outsider figure who breaks his back in an ill-fated descent down the ruins’ shaft. So not only do we lose the pathos of a mortally wounded character whom the language barrier has rendered completely isolated (the Greek), we also strip ersatz group leader Jeff of his other competent counterpoint (Matthias), whose calm and melancholy works in strange harmony with Jeff’s frustration and angry optimism in the novel.
Then, for reasons less immediately apparent, Stacy and Eric swap roles so that it’s she who becomes infested with the killer vine and subsequently falls apart at the seams. This switch has the unfortunate effect of producing a far more stock character—the hysterical female, the Barbara from Night of the Living Dead—than what we had in the book. It also creates less of a contrast between Jeff and Eric, so now instead of a sullen MacGyver and an OCD self-mutilator we’ve got two shades of macho, one simply less take-charge than the other.
But let’s get back to the good—the suffering. It’s palpable and at times hard to watch. Though essentially asked to embody a cliche, Laura Ramsey as Stacy in particular is extraordinary. As with Malone, her body is used astutely by the filmmakers first to entice and then to unnerve with its soft, all-underbelly physicality. Her screams and sobs during the scene in which her friends finally take a knife to her to try to extract the infestation are so gutwrenchingly convincing I literally almost started crying myself out of sheer sympathy. Shortly thereafter she’s asked to carry the biggest gore effect in the film and aces it with understatements and false bravado, which quickly give way to utter (and utterly believable) despair. Malone is mostly her support throughout, but she’s quite good at it, repeatedly drawing on childlike gestures (hand-holding, hugging). And the person-on-person gore is as unflinching as you’ve heard, as raw as David Cronenberg’s recent crime movies.
What about Jeff, though? In the novel his was one of the most unique survival-horror characters I’d ever seen: He got more and more on top of his game as events progressed, as though on fire with the knowledge that his whole life had led him to this moment—yet he became less and less likable as this happened, and he knew it, and he still couldn’t do anything about it. (Along with Will Smith’s competent-to-the-point-of-neurosis Robert Neville in Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend, Jeff was one of two fascinating riffs on the Survivor Type I came across last year.) Actor Jonathan Tucker has a hangdog handsomeness, a weary beauty, that lights him from within as he plays out Jeff’s ever-increasing level of no-nonsense decision making. The problem is that he’s not playing it out against anything. The aforementioned changes to the characters and their relationships gives him less to work with. Meanwhile the novel’s relentless emphasis on quotidian physical deterioration (as opposed to the menace of the vines or even just the Mayans)—thirst, sunburn, filth, starvation, heat, aches and pains, the need to find and conserve food and water and pain medication—is almost completely eliminated from the film beyond a few token shots of rationed grapes and swigs from a water bottle. What I missed most of all is the characters’ use of booze: The fact that the Greek packed more tequila than water, Eric Stacy and Amy repeatedly getting drunk despite knowing it will help kill them, and most importantly Jeff (and Matthias)’s reaction to their drunken stupidity. With none of those factors there to test him, we don’t really feel Jeff’s pain over knowing he’s got to be good enough to survive on behalf of the whole group.
Which leads us to the end of the film, the most rushed part of the whole movie. It deviates significantly from the novel, which is fine in principle, and could have even worked in practice. But since they couldn’t depict Jeff’s struggles throughout, they condense it into an incongruous “his name was Robert Paulson” speech to the Mayans that feels grafted from a different movie and makes Jeff’s sacrifice feel like it was done out of a kind of shakily established chivalry rather than fatigued rage. The penultimate sequence is straight out of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or The Descent, a nice bookend to the Shining riff of the opening credits. But given what we know of the vines’ epidemiology, this development has eschatological repercussions that are completely unexplored. Instead we get a coda involving the remaining Greeks that cuts so quickly to the closing credits and their mood-killing Yeah Yeah Yeahs music that it’s almost like the movie had a plane to catch or something. I understand the filmmakers’ need to shorten a marathon to a steeplechase, but not this breakneck sprint to the finish line.
Part of me wishes I’d gone into the movie sight-unseen, like all those Ain’t It Cool reviewers. I probably would have remained mightily impressed by the performances and by Carter Smith’s taut, smart shots. I doubt I’d have felt the cuts and the rush, and I probably would have gone and read the book afterwards anyway. Coulda woulda shoulda.
