Silent Hill: Revelação

Yea, so this movie wasn't exactly stellar, but I can't understand why there are so many 1 star votes for this film. I just got around to seeing this movie last night and it certainly wasn't the worst film I've ever seen, but reading some of the reviews around here (and on the critic sites) one would think this film is just a steaming pile of poop.

Well, it wasn't. The acting was decent, and I thought the lead was reasonably good. There were more "jump scares" than I would've expected, since the real horror of the games stems from atmosphere and a feeling of isolation. The monsters and CGI were passable - not great by certainly not bad by any means. The 3D was actually VERY good (maybe the best I've seen), though there were a couple of times that the use of the 3D was pretty cliché (think knives COMING RIGHT FOR YOU!!!). The only real gripe I had was with the scripting/story. I was impressed that the plot stayed as true to the games as it did, while still meshing well with the story from the first movie. I'm sure this was no easy task, but the amount of story they crammed into this film was too much considering the runtime of the movie. The exposition dialogue was REALLY cheesy at times, but I can understand the need for such when considering probably half of the target audience will have never played the games. I just would've hired a better writer.

TL;DR: Not as bad as the critics say, but certainly not the film I was hoping this to be. Worth the price of admission for 3D, as it's really well done.

"Everyone has a different nightmare in Silent Hill, I am theirs." Heather Mason (Clemens) has been plagued by nightmares ever since she was little. Her and her father (Bean) constantly are on the move trying to find a way to help her. One day when Heather is at school her father is taken and the only thing left are the words Silent Hill. Heather must now venture into her nightmare in order to get him out. It might just be that I'm older but movies like this don't tend to scare me at all. When the goal is to just out gore the previous scene it really has an impact on the movie. I knew going in that this wasn't gonna be an amazing movie anyway and the actual story wasn't really that bad but when mixed with the armless zombie things and gallons of blood it really is more of a distraction then anything. Again though it may be because I'm too old. Younger fans of this stuff may enjoy it, I did not. Overall, OK story line but tried to be Saw. I give it a C+.

The first half of the film was great. It was creepy, it was suspenseful, and it was almost scary (speaking as someone who considers most scary films to be dull and silly). The film did a good job of summarizing the first, and the 3D was generally well-done. So where did this film fail? Well first, the character relationships were extremely superficial, to the point where it felt like they were tacked-on or unrealistic. Some of the character motivations were also underdeveloped and made the characters come off as stupid or just hard to relate to, especially towards the end. The characters take a while to actually enter Silent Hill, and when they do the film quickly devolves from creepy moments to explaining the story, which is not particularly compelling. Obviously, the film makers had to work within the context of the original while trying to tie it into the third game, but so much of the film was devoted to characters explaining the plot that it made the film feel somewhat dull. Think of the old adage "show, don't tell". The film was overly short, and it seemed as though this was the central problem. 20 more minutes to SHOW the plot, interspersed with a few more creepy scenes, and this film could have easily surpassed the original. Alas, the director chose to keep the film succinct, and the result is that it feels rushed and the last ten or fifteen minutes feel more like a cheesy action movie than a horror film. As I said, with twenty more minutes of footage, the film could have easily been one of the scariest movies of the last 10 years, and could have had believable characters and a more expertly revealed plot. Instead, we're left with a decent movie with a few good scares.

I'll first of all point out that I am quite the Silent Hill fan before explaining that this director did not get the point of Silent Hill.

The games and indeed some aspects of the last film provoked fear through the unknown, the fact that the characters were totally lost and on their own in a place where anything could happen. The creatures were scary and the less we knew about them, the scarier they were. In the last film the acting was great and there was plenty of suspense, and a decent director and art team running the project.

This one had some great visuals, the environments were great to look at. The CGI effects however, were not. Neither was the poor use of the actors talent, and the over use of extra human characters and monsters. These combined with a terrible attempt to almost follow the 3rd game TOO closely whilst remaining loyal to the first film, makes for a bad experience. It's nice to see that the director here tried to make a nice little tie in with both the games and the film, but the last film wandered into it's own little story, which luckily turned out well. he should have stuck to following the games, or the last film instead of both. Then he needed to write up some less cliché' lines for the actors.

Now I'm okay with movies that didn't follow exactly like the original plot from games, books, etc like the first Silent Hill movie, I think it is still fine. But this one is just BAD. I'm not sure what I was watching but I didn't feel like I was watching a full movie. It just lack of many things. Maybe it's too short, maybe Silent Hill 3 is just not suitable to be made into a movie because the story is all about Heather trying to find the truth about herself, and since we already knew that at the beginning, what is there to tell anymore? And we as an audience already knew how her father is doing, only Heather didn't know, again there's nothing to look forward too. We just merely watching Heather going from point A to B and nothing else. It is that dull and plain.

And the horror? the movie is trying too hard to be creepy. What's with all the pointless close up of meat cutting and bloody mouthful eating. I don't know it just didn't work for me.