Last year, I fell into all the hype about Scott Smith’s supposedly awesome book called The Ruins, so I bought it and quickly finished reading it. I liked the book all the way up until the end, and that’s because it really didn’t have an ending. Instead, the story just stopped. When I heard this movie was being made with Ben Stiller producing, I hoped maybe some things would be changed to improve the original story. However, when I saw that Scott Smith adapted his own screenplay, I feared for the worse. In short, this movie isn’t any better than the book, and I thought the book sucked.

The premise of this story is great. Four American tourists are in Mexico on vacation. They meet a German tourist who tells them about how his brother never came back from an overnight visit to some remote Mayan ruin that isn’t on any map. He talks the Americans into going into the jungle the next day to help him look for his brother, and at the same time they can take some photos of the ruin. The Americans were especially interested in visiting that remote ruin location because it wasn’t all touristy like the others.

Upon arrival to the ruin, a bunch of local villagers come out of the jungle with guns and bows, and start shouting at the Americans and German in Mayan. Nobody understands what is happening, then somebody gets killed, then they are all forced to climb to the top of the ruin while the villagers stay on the ground. Nobody knows why the villagers won’t let anybody off the ruin. Very soon, it becomes evident that something is very special about this particular ruin, and it seems their chances of survival are extremely slim, though death will not come at the hands of the villagers.

I didn’t think this movie was very scary. It has some very realistic gore, including some dismemberment, but there is really just one moment where you might jump. The rest of it is kind of silly and leaves too much unexplained. On top of that, the characters make far too many dumb mistakes and there are plot holes all over the place. I have the same main complaint about this movie that I did about the book – It needed to be just a little longer to help fill out the story better. There just wasn’t enough to it, and what you get ends up being a big let down.

On a side note, this is the very first Blu-Ray movie I watched on my Sony PlayStation 3. I must tell you there is a very noticeable difference in image quality between DVD and Blu-Ray. This movie features a lot of outdoor photography with vibrant colors, and the clarity was incredible. My TV isn’t even 1080p, so I can only imagine what Blu-Ray would look like on a really good HDTV.

In the end, The Ruins had a lot of potential but ultimately floundered. It is yet another movie that falls into the disturbing trend of not giving stories a proper ending. Author Stephen King is notorious for doing this, and I’m finding it happen more often in feature films. Maybe it is the hope of filmmakers to better secure a sequel if they end on a cliffhanger, but I think it’s mainly just lazy writing and cheap storytelling. This movie was a bomb at the box office, making only $17 million domestically.


Recommended:
No

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age