Silent Hill : Revelations

[Mikaze]

>:(

Details forthcoming.

[TriOmegaZero]

That bad? I guess next weekend will just be Wreck-It-Ralph.

[Beckett]

It's Silent Hill. It can not be bad.

[Velcro Zipper]

Silent Hill deserves a better film franchise.

While I can say I'm pleased the studio had enough faith in the property to make this a theatrical release and not some straight-to-DVD crapfest, I'm sad it still turned out to be a bit of a crapfest. The script is pretty awful, and it was painful to watch the actors slog through all the hacky expository dialog of the first act. The nightmare world of Silent Hill still looks awesome thanks to the special effects team, but it seems like the rules established by the first movie were completely forgotten.

At times, it's kind of hard to tell whose side the monsters are on. In the first film, it was pretty firmly established the nightmare monsters were created with symbolic meaning to punish the cult who killed Alessa. This time around, the beasts come off as simple wild animals and the cult seems to be trying to round them up and train them like Pokémon. That brings me to the cult itself.

The group of cultists in this film are apparently a separate group that didn't take refuge in the church from the first movie and, unlike the ashy, soiled realistic looking clothes the church group wore, most of these guys dress the way you expect video game bad guys to dress. Why they chose to live in a steam factory under an amusement park instead of the church and why they were never mentioned in the first film is never explained, but their leader does toss out that she's another sister of Christabella, the woman who led the group from the first movie. Also, I know the place is in the game, but I'm still not sure why an isolated, sparsely populated mining town full of puritan-like cultists had its own carnival.

I guess my biggest problem with the film is that it plays out too much like the video game and not enough like the serious horror story it could be. I liked the first movie because it seemed they let the horror story steer the plot instead of a Prima strategy guide to beating Silent Hill 3.

I'll apprehensively await a third movie just because the ending of Revelations provides a hint that, maybe next time around, we'll finally get to see Sean Bean punch or monster or something but, based on the reviews I've seen and the money Revelations is making, I doubt a third film will get made.

By the way, Wreck-it Ralph was awesome.

[Ringtail]

My fiance dragged me to this; with me having 0 experience with anything Silent Hill, so I was prepared to be bored and confused while I enjoyed my overpriced theater popcorn and plastic 3-D glasses (which fit really awkardly and uncomfortably over my own glasses). I normally don't do 3-D movies anyway since they don't work for me, they just come off blurry and out of focus and just give me a head-ache (maybe there is a problem with my eyes), but I figured that I wouldn't be paying that much attention anyway, but my other didn't want to go alone and I figured I wouldn't be paying much attention anyway (I brought Sudoku). But I'm getting off topic.

The movie was rather sub-par, even though my fiance enjoyed the crap out of it (he has terrible taste when it comes to film). For me the movie was basically watching a monster that I'm pretty sure was torn right out of another video game (the slayer, from The Suffering, a rather under-appreciated XBox title) stalk some random girl (seriously though- I swear one scene was ripped straight out of a cutscene from The Suffering) where some dude gets impaled through the head by the thing and dragged upward out of a cell-like elevator thing (I wasn't paying that close of attention). And the scene with the mannequins was reminisicent of Dr. Killjoy's asylum basement in The Suffering. So overall, I dubbed the movie The Suffering Monster Fight Club Movie.

On the bright side, Malcolm McDowell was in it, briefly, and that was cool.

[Kthulhu]

Hate to break this to you, but The Suffering came out a full year after Silent Hill 3.

I also always find it amusing when someone is amazingly not entertained by something that they obviously wrote off beforehand. News flash...if you don't bother to pay any attention to the film, it isn't going to be entertaining to you regardless of the quality. The guy who actually watches Casablanca is probably going to enjoy it more than some guy who has it on in the background while he reads the paper and works on a sudoku puzzle.

[Ringtail]

Casablanca; now there is a good movie.

As I mentioned, I have 0 experience with Silent Hill, so it didn't really matter what came first to me.

Played my sudoku on my phone for about 10 minutes, got bored, watched the movie. Had a few neat scense, but overall, thought it was lame. I expect not to like most movies I am going to see. They seem that much better when they surprise me. Hasn't happened in a while, though. But, like I said, my fiance is a Silent Hill nut and enjoyed the crap out of it, so maybe it is good for Silent Hill fans, but it wasn't my taste in movies.

[ghettowedge]

Velcro Zipper wrote:

Silent Hill deserves a better film franchise.

While I can say I'm pleased the studio had enough faith in the property to make this a theatrical release and not some straight-to-DVD crapfest, I'm sad it still turned out to be a bit of a crapfest. The script is pretty awful, and it was painful to watch the actors slog through all the hacky expository dialog of the first act. The nightmare world of Silent Hill still looks awesome thanks to the special effects team, but it seems like the rules established by the first movie were completely forgotten.

At times, it's kind of hard to tell whose side the monsters are on. In the first film, it was pretty firmly established the nightmare monsters were created with symbolic meaning to punish the cult who killed Alessa. This time around, the beasts come off as simple wild animals and the cult seems to be trying to round them up and train them like Pokémon. That brings me to the cult itself.

The group of cultists in this film are apparently a separate group that didn't take refuge in the church from the first movie and, unlike the ashy, soiled realistic looking clothes the church group wore, most of these guys dress the way you expect video game bad guys to dress. Why they chose to live in a steam factory under an amusement park instead of the church and why they were never mentioned in the first film is never explained, but their leader does toss out that she's another sister of Christabella, the woman who led the group from the first movie. Also, I know the place is in the game, but I'm still not sure why an isolated, sparsely populated mining town full of puritan-like cultists had its own carnival.

I guess my biggest problem with the film is that it plays out too much like the video game and not enough like the serious horror story it could be. I liked the first movie because it seemed they let the horror story steer the plot instead of a Prima strategy guide to beating Silent Hill 3.

I'll apprehensively await a third movie just...

This, almost word for word. By the third delivery of pages of exposition while the camera zoomed around in circles, I gave up.

There was even a hug fight.

[Velcro Zipper]

@ghettowedge - Ahh, crap. Like alot of this movie, I'd completely forgotten about the hug fight until you brought it up, damn you.

[Mikaze]

TriOmegaZero wrote:

That bad? I guess next weekend will just be Wreck-It-Ralph.

Srsly, a friend who saw both movies saw this post and told me to tell you "yes". :(

SPOILERS AHOY

This is not an exhaustive list of problems with the movie, because I think I'm going to get tired before it's anywhere near complete.

Leaving aside the obvious "they changed it, now it sucks" usual videogame adaptation unhappiness, there were a lot of things wrong with this movie. The first movie had problems too, but it was much more well put together and Christorpher Gans definitely had a grasp on what he wanted his film to do.

The dialogue is supernaturally awkward. For a while I was seriously wondering if they were trying to evoke the feel of the first Silent Hill's dialogue and voice acting. I'm not saying a woman calling her hustband "my love" in the modern age can't work, but man. You gotta put it in the right context or it's going to be stilted as hell.

Tying into the dialogue problem and leading into the pacing problem: One of the things that bugged me the most about the first Silent Hill movie was the megaton exposition bomb near the end. Instead of learning their lessons with the sequal, it's now an exposition clusterbomb. Characters are brought in solely to infodump and then shuffle out, because this movie doesn't know narrative.

Oh yeah, the pacing. This is something critically important to a horror film. Especially if you're trying to adapt freakin' Silent Hill. You have to dedicate time to building up tension and dread(and also make the viewers care about your protagonists, or at least invest in them). This movie on the other hand quickly turns into a series of random encounters. It's less a sotry and more of a spookhouse ride.

Monster overexposure. The first film was much better about this. In all seriousness, this movie shows the creatures more clearly than the games ever did, and there's a reason why they work in the latter and not in the former. Some things work better glimpsed or in half-shadow than being viewed in clear light. And then there's just plain overexposure. Pyramid Head has been the series' number one victim for this, even in the actual games.

Misfires. Look, make-up artists. I respect a lot of what you guys do even for films that don't turn out all that great. But if you're trying to set up a scene where someone's appearance is supposed to be shocking and horrifying, "Juggalo" is not the first thing you want coming to the audience's mind.

Dipping into things that disappoint as a Silent Hill fan:

The changes made in the first film(turning Silent Hill into a Centralia-like mining town rather than the resort town of the games, turning the gnostic/pseudo-Aztec hybrid cult into a seemingly puritanical one, etc.) combined with this movie's attempt to cleave much closer to the original plot of the games leads to a lot of issues, especially when they try to follow the general locale sequence from Silent Hill 3. This also results in a lot of characters being dumbed down. What they did with Douglas isn't really worth bothering with. Vincent was a bag of frustration all on his own, especially with his teen romance role supplanting Douglas' role. Claudia easily gets the worst of it. Originally a character with tragic ties to Alessa/Cheryl/Heather in the actual game, here she's a palette swap of the first film's villain. I take that back, Alessa gets the worst of it. The game-to-movie plot changes of the first game carry over here, so where her confrontation with Heather was about a possibly suicidal urge to stop her from possibly unleashing the evil she was trying to keep contained, here she's the malevolent source of most of the badness going on.

Some original monsters just didn't really fit the feel of Silent Hill. The "Missionary" was just a bit much. Honestly, it was the transformation sequence that put it over the top. It's the sawblades going in that kills it. I'm not saying that monster idea odens't work, but the feel they got out of it didn't feel like Silent Hill at all. The mannequin spider is even more jarring. It really is a straight-up random encounter with no real thematic ties to Heather's story(especially since a lot of the themes specific to her were abandoned for the movie.)

All of the shout-outs to the fans. Okay, yes. The people involved really do seem to love Silent Hill. But man. All of the trivia and references to the series get to the point that it actively hurts the feel of the film they were trying to make. No joke, after the climax, during the part where the audience should be riding their emotional high to a resting point, there's a rapid fire sequence of references that serve either as sequel hooks(oh God please no) or the filmmakers going "Eh? EH?" From the beginning of another search that I'm terrified is going to lead into a botched adaptation fo Silent Hill 2 to Travis from Silent Hill: Origins showing up to give the heroes a ride to the guys from Silent Hill: Downpour driving in the other direction...it.....dammit.

Oh God they're going to screw up Silent Hill 2, aren't they?

The 3D. It's bad. It is very bad. This is a prime example of 3D done poorly and intrusively. This is basic 3D movie problem stuff that we've seen time and time again. The camera getting attacked constantly, scene composition getting screwed up by overuse of 3D popping...it's just a collection of bad filmmaking habits that get encouraged by the 3D market, and I hate that Silent Hill fell victim to it.

Loss of symbolism and theme from the games. Silent Hill 3 had a lot of uncomfortable sexual/pregnancy themed imagery tied into Heather's story and character, but it didn't really feel gratuitous in that context. Here, we get naked women on tables and wrapped in plastic getting felt up by a mannequin amalgam monster, and it absolutely does feel gratuitous. It didn't have to, but the way the story is told that's how it comes across.

It ends with a Mortal Kombat-style monster fight while the protagonists watch. On a glowing neon stage. It was at that point that I began to doubt taht this film had faithfully captured the spirit of the Silent Hill series.

Postive things:

Spoiler:

Sean Bean/Harry Mason lives. Unfortunately this comes at the price of a good movie, and it leaves the shadow of a butchered Silent Hill 2 adaptation hanging over the audience's heads. But the universe owes us one, so I'm taking this as a positive in the context of this movie.

Some of the original monsters are useful outside this film. They might not have been good fits for Silent Hill, but the Missionary makes for some nice kyton imagery and the way the mannequin monster works just screams awesome fey monster. Heck, taking them on their own, I could quite like them, and now I really am thinking about that latter creature could work in a game. But just not for Silent Hill.

...

Honestly, I recommend just playing Silent Hill 3 instead of seeing this movie. You'll get a better story and a more effective horror experience out of it. Though I do recommend playing the first game first...

Also the second. It was definitely the best told story of the three, even if I prefer the first as a horror game.