2004 saw a cult horror hit our screens in Silent Hill (based on the long running series of mind-bending video games); influenced by the eponymous, fog covered town which lead to pretty much Hell on Earth, it was creatively rather good but critically panned by game fans, reviewers and casual viewers alike. However, the original director and producer were planning on building up to retell the third game but needed to get through the first one to explain the concept. So, we’re all set to go with their version of Silent Hill 3 on the big screen… except they left this project after announcing the sequel, and left us with an absolute mess.
Picking up a few years after the last film, the town has spewed up Sharon and she’s back in the care of her father (Sean Bean, Game Of Thrones). Constantly on the run from a cult who believes Sharon will bring about the apocalypse (as a vessel for a demon), the two adopt new identities as Harry and Heather (Adelaide Clemens, Wasted On The Young) Mason. One day the cult catches up with them and drags Harry off to Silent Hill, before Heather’s latest classmate Vincent (Kit Harington, Game Of Thrones also) half persuades, half dissuades, her to go the dark place. Once there, they find a grim trap has been placed to stop Heather from becoming one with the demon she’s due to spawn.
Cast-wise Silent Hill: Revelation simply falls apart; as the game made Heather a rather sympathetic character who didn’t have a clue what was going on, but Clemens doesn’t have the poise to pull off a similar emotional connection and, while it is horrible what she ends up going through, she’s just so bland in her performance that she didn’t mean a thing to anyone watching (and she’s meant to be the heroine!), and even the usually reliable Bean is kept to a minimum (whilst brandishing a fantastically bad American accent).
Harington acts like a wet-fish in a stark contrast to his heroic role in Thrones, and Carrie Ann Moss (The Matrix) steps out of obscurity to play the cult leader, for a mere five minutes, in a stupid mind buggery of a role, with the only highlight of the cast (and the film for that matter) being Malcolm McDowell (A Clockwork Orange); playing a blind, chained-up, lobotomised, granddad; his role is made from sheer madness, but the fact that it’s McDowell more than makes up for the film so far… but not the rest of it.
To be fair, it does look like a Silent Hill movie; after all the crew changes, director Michael J. Bassett (Deathwatch) does the best with what he has, with a much reduced budget after the average performance of the first film; and all the transformation effects between the real world, fog Silent Hill, and the Hell dimension, are neat (with walls being ripped apart like tearing flesh in a disgustingly interesting effect). The monsters, although a bit silly, look like something out of a Clive Barker book; with the highlight being the spider creature made of a mannequins, which creates an unnerving visual experience.
As a horror film however, it’s a bust; there are minimal scares (and most of them are just jumpy moments); there’s no atmosphere compared to the first film where the town was playing with you before making it’s move; menacingly watching you through the buildings and post boxes on the street. Here the town is barely explored before we move into uninteresting locales which we’ve seen before, and where there are a lot of scenes with too many characters (taking away any impressions of loneliness and depression that made the games and parts of the first film work).
What’s laughable is that the producers have gone on record to say that they wanted to make this sequel more accessible for a casual audience, but if this was my first time with the Silent Hill films I wouldn’t have a clue what’s going on; too many flashbacks and barely comprehensible jargon-ish dialogue should have no place here. Is it really important to shove in references from the games for the sake of it whilst trying to appeal to new fans? Not at all. And with all the religious artefacts flying around you’ll be left confused whether Heather is the vessel/mother/daughter/whatever of the demon that the cult is trying to stop, as all the bad storytelling and game references really does make it impossible for newcomers to comprehend Revelation.
Take series staple Pyramid Head for example. He’s seen in the background in one or two scenes doing particularly nasty things but at the end of the runtime he’s turned into this good guy monster who we’re meant to cheer for in a completely random final battle. For no reason at all. Now I know who he is from playing the games but he’s never named in this sequel or the first, leaving whoever’s watching this for their first trip to Silent Hill not having a fucking clue what this character is about at all.
On the growing list of average video game adaptations, Revelation does capture parts of the spirit of the games. However, there is a better Silent Hill film out already, and it’s called Silent Hill. At least with that, it didn’t try and impress you with references to the games being shot at your ears and eyes and created it’s own take on the mythos basing it on the enemy that is the town itself. The fact that they’ve pumped the franchise with anything they could slap on the screen (including some of the newer and less known game characters) does not make for a good film and it’s so boring to see them all listed off, I ended up thinking that the last Resident Evil movie would be more worth my time than this.
All the way throughout this film, I had one thought – “This is such a frustratingly dull film” which should have been impossible; you take a concept like Silent Hill, a golden Ferrari for a visual experience on the big screen, and turn it into a rusted Reliant Robin in final execution. If Revelation is really the story the crew wanted to tell, and it’s taken 10+ years and a previous film to get to this point, then I’d happily wait over 100 years until I see it again.
Terry Lewis – @thatterrylewis.
