Continuity mistake: Naomi Watts' dark roots change length throughout the movie.
Continuity mistake: When the woman is watching the film and trying to see the lighttower, she has blood in her nostrill even though she has not yet started to bleed.
Continuity mistake: In the scene where Rachel approaches the horse and the horse starts going crazy, you can see the ring at the end of the rope securing the horse break away from the trailor. In the next sequence when the horse is running around on the barge, the rope is broken with no ring.
Continuity mistake: When Noah is at the supermarket buying cigarettes, he pulls out of his pocket a bunch of junk such as coins, trash, and an old pack of cigarettes and dumps it on the counter. In the next shot of the counter, all the junk is gone except for a coin, and the old pack of cigarettes.
Answer: At the end of the movie, she is crying about why she wasn't killed and Noah was. She vocalizes "What did I do, that he didn't?" That's when she sees the copy she made. It wasn't that she just showed it to someone else. She made a copy and Aiden watched that copy. Aiden is why it skipped her.
Almost right. It's just the copy. Copying the video makes it skip you. That's why she has Aiden make a copy as well.
lionhead
You have to show the copy to someone else as well. That's why Aiden asks Rachel at the very end "What about the person we show it to? What happens to them?"
Phaneron ★
But doesn't he have less than a day left by then? Hardly a time to relax, they need to make a terrible decision, quickly. I always had the idea making a copy was enough because of that.
lionhead
He watched the tape the morning of either Rachel's 4th or 5th day, so he should have at least 3 days left by this point. Though it appears the film was being inconsistent with the markings that Samara leaves on the tape's viewers, since Rachel noticed Samara's hand print on Aiden's arm and then his nose started bleeding. For Rachel, she got her nosebleed before receiving the mark on her arm.
Phaneron ★
Actually, you need to do both: make a copy and show it to someone else. This is further explained in The Ring 2. At the beginning, the guy had made a copy but since the girl covered her eyes and didn't watch the whole thing, he was still killed by Samara. So making a copy is not enough in itself to be spared if no-one else watches it. The same goes for Rachel. She made a copy on the 2nd day, but Becca tells her she only has 4 days left when she visits the psych ward indicating she hadn't been spared yet. It's only after Aidan watches the copy she made that death skips her for good.