Silent Hill: Revelation–Bafflingly Wrong

There is a place called Silent Hill where all who enter must pay for their sins. Sadly, such a place does not actually exist, because if you've had a hand in the Silent Hill film franchise, you deserve to be torn apart by flesh monsters.

The Silent Hill video game franchise has, at times, been the purest example I can offer to non-gamer friends of the power of interactive storytelling. It's use of tone, theme, mood, and music leave an impression you'll never shake. I could spend the rest of the review geeking out over it, but if you'd like a nice summary I'd suggest you watch Yahtzee Croshaw's Zero Punctuation on the subject. See that fervent dedication from a guy who hates everything, professionally? Yeah. That's how great it is. The series has had some low points, especially in recent incarnations, but the soul of Silent Hill is so layered and fascinating, I've managed to excuse the failures in celebration of even the briefest returns to the setting I love so dearly.

No such forgiveness was extended to the first Silent Hill film, although I'm one of the few who doesn't believe it needs an excuse. Christophe Gans' movie was train-wrecky in parts, but was the first video game adaptation to cater more to the fans than to its filmic audience, which is inherently complicated when gamer standards often prioritize all the wrong elements. The production design was awe-inspiring, which allowed space to forgive a non-native English speaking director for allowing some terrible line delivery. 2006's Silent Hill wasn't perfect, nor was it the shitstorm that critics believed it to be. It treated the franchise as art and conveyed a complicated tale of nightmarish revenge and wasn't afraid to take its time. 

Would Silent Hill: Revelation learn from the mistakes of its predecessor and become the best game movie yet? Absolutely not. Director Michael J. Bassett (Solomon Kane) manages to run this film so far into the ground it almost guarantees to end the Silent Hill film lineage. Or at least guarantee that future installments will have a much lower budget, and that could be a great thing, because with all Revelation's bells and whistles, they forgot to add anything resembling substance.

With the announcement of transitioning to 3D blockbuster, I assumed that we'd be seeing a less artistic, more action-oriented vision of this dark world. Instead we got more loud noises, and less moments of genuine fear. The scariest moment in the entire film comes courtesy of a Pop-Tart. That's not a joke. The production design is less impressive this time through, trading physical elements for more CGI, and even less of Akira Yamaoka's hypnotic scoring is used. "Facebook" is mentioned at least four times, telling you everything you need to know about whether dialogue has improved this time around. It's a flat, emotionless experience that creates more questions about plot holes than it creates dread.

The child protagonist of the first film has aged to seventeen, while her father has apparently not aged a day. When a private detective and forces of evil discover her whereabouts, she must return to Silent Hill to save her family, and a boy, and a town, and herself, and the whole thing requires so much backstory that it’s amazing they find time to save anyone. The film is burdened from start to finish with clumsy exposition and few revelations worthy of the title. One big twist, involving the main characters' identities is clumsily explained away in the first few minutes. Not that any of it should matter to fans of the series, since this second film directly adapts the third game, while bringing nothing new to the table. In fact, it removes some of the more disturbing sequences and in their place gives us a final battle between two monsters. Not since Alien vs Predator have iconic horror creatures been pulled from their hiding in the darkness to engage in a stupid fistfight that so horribly maligns their terrifying nature.

Revelation raises questions about the nature of adaptation. If the first film's biggest problem was catering too much to the fan base, why stumble over the same issue here? But more importantly, if that is your intention, why "adapt" so directly that it leaves your target market bored by your complete lack of interpretation. And if you're only making Silent Hill for people who already know Silent Hill, why waste our time with thirty minutes of back-story when you could be bringing Francis Bacon's worst nightmares to life? In the end, we all would have preferred a big dumb 3D movie with better scares and more monsters to a film that dabbles in wanting to dive deeper but winds up floundering instead. Which is perhaps the most damning criticism I can level against Silent Hill 2—I've never wished a movie could be dumbed dumb to improve it.

Finally, the film ends (not a spoiler) setting up a sequel featuring Sean Bean's character. Famously, Bean was added to the first film because the studio was afraid of producing a feature without a male protagonist. Now we're trying to set him up for his own story? And all of this takes place while the film ends on a note tied directly to the latest video game. It's fan service without any service and it's goddamned insulting.