Silent Hill
25 Apr 2006, 9:30 pm
Here's my review of it. Spoilers ahoy--nothing major, just the setup and a description of one of the major gore moments.
To be honest, I was really kinda worried when going into "Silent Hill." First of all, we'd gotten there just before the trailers started, and I thought that they already had started before we walked in. Second of all, this was a game adaptation. Third of all...well, most of the reviews I'd read had been pretty damn positive, but all had said that the film was disturbing and gory as hell. Okay, so why was I seeing it? Two words: cool monsters. Kind of a lame reason, I know, but based on what I'd seen in footage from the film (and the games), the monsters looked flat-out badass. Also, I just wanted to see if this was indeed a good game adaptation. I mean, I'd thought "Doom" was kind of a fun action movie, but that was in part because my expectations were so low (rarely do I rent a film that I expect to be that bad), and I can't deny that that movie was full of problems. I was bothered, though, by the local paper's recent review of "Silent Hill"--they'd given it the chair. (Instead of a number of stars, the SF Chronicle has a little man in a chair. An empty chair is basically one star; he's sleeping if it's two stars; clapping if it's four; acting like a seal if it's five; etc.) If that many people loved it (as shown on the IMDB reviews), then it couldn't be worth the chair, especially since you had to at least give the film credit for the great visuals shown in the trailers and clips. I'd decided not to pay that review much attention, though, because the author spent a majority of the first page just complaining about the film being two hours and five minutes rather than an hour and a half. Oh, please. The standard running time is about two hours and fifteen minutes these days--maybe not for horror movies or comedies, but seriously, so many films in the past few years have been over two hours. When a review's main criticism is that the film is the standard length rather than 80 minutes, I find it hard to take that opinion too seriously.
Okay. The previews ended with that great new "Da Vinci Code" trailer (very excited about that one, loved da book, even if the Merovingians didn't have any middle eastern blood), and then the movie was starting. The lights faded, but annoyingly the "Exit" signs stayed on, and kind of disrupted the mood. Man, this is the sorta movie that needs to be seen in the dark! Stupid Exit signs. And stupid people bringing their baby in here. For crissakes, just because there's a little girl on the poster (al bit one without a mouth) it doesn't mean it's a kid's movie! Hells no. But, then, there's at least one crying little kid or baby at practically every movie I see in theaters, and most movies I see these days are R, and the ones that aren't tend to be generally hard PG-13. (Half the movies that come out are R, so don't blame me.) Parents are dumb.
So...how was it? Did it disturb the hell out of me? Could I sleep that night?
Short version: I liked it. I liked it a lot. But no, I couldn't sleep because I can never sleep, and these days tend to go to sleep at about two despite going to bed at ten or eleven. Damn hormones funking my body up.
In case you have no idea what "Silent Hill" is about, well, the story starts off kinda simple. Rose is worried about her creepy sleep walking adopted daughter named Sharon (Rose...Sharon...get it? Rose of Sharon! Possible Stienbeckian reference?). Sharon screams "Silent Hill!! !!" in her sleepwalks, so Rose brings her to the ghost town of that name--which, it just so happens, is haunted. Well, of course they're immidiately separated and before too long, Rose is being bombarded by ashy grey babies with huge crying mouths, a big dude with a pyramid for a head and a big f****n' sword, and other monsters that simply defy explaination. The mystery here winds up turning out pretty interesting, and unlike a lot of critics, I understood the story fine. (Funny how that always happens.) You just gotta get past that this isn't the real world--this is more of the nightmare world. This is a world where ideas are physically manifested, where demons really do exist, and where people are trapped in a single moment in time forever. People don't behave rationally, but as they do when they're too stressed to think, or as they do when they are in dreams--as though they are guided by some mysterious force. A script, probably. Hahahah! No, seriously, don't you ever feel as though some invisible thing is sometimes guiding you in dreams and nightmares? It's like that here. Only in this case, these characters actually are under interesting influences.
It's indeed a pretty sick movie. I didn't think it'd be too bad at the start, because while the monster designs are wonderfully twisted, there's almost no blood or gore for the first hour and twenty minutes. But then the yucko scenes start kicking in. See, rather than having an overabundance of gore, "Silent Hill" is subtler. It focuses more on having fun buildup to brief scenes of creative, clever carnage, each one more disturbing than the last. The buildup is always juuuust long enough for the grisley moments to catch you off guard (unless you already knew where they were due to spoiling yourself silly, or something), but you don't have long, lingering shots, so it's rarely boring. I wouldn't say that it pushes the limits of the R rating, because I've seen loads of other films that I've found more disturbing and/or bloody. (I don't really understand the arguement that films aren't gory enough these days--they're gorier than ever, guys! Yeah, there are some PG-13 horror movies, but Christ, I've seen more movie blood recently than I want to admit.) That said, the few gory scenes are all pretty f*****g disturbing in their own right, and combined with monsters that most people will probably be quite bothered by, it's not a film for the most feint of heart. Now, I wasn't too scared so much as disguisted, in part because I was too busy going "coooool" at the visuals, and in part because I'd spoiled myself silly with reviews and clips and trailers and video previews and featurettes (all seen in an effort to decide whether or not to risk seeing this potentially traumatizing film in theaters--or at least that was my excuse, heh), so I knew way too much of what was going to happen. See, that kills fear. A huge part of fear is being afraid of fear itself, and while I dreaded the "pyramid head ripping somebody's skin off" scene I'd read about, the fact that I knew what was coming at all made the film loose a lot of its power--especially since I have a tendency to imagine things worse than they could ever be in a film. The skin ripping scene, while definately nasty, was so brief that when it was over, I was relieved more than anything. I mean, I was picturing the Pyramid Head taking his big sword and slowly peeling some poor woman's arm flesh off with it, peeling it off inches at a time, and of course the necessary screams of horror and showers of blood. But no. Rather, he just kinda removed her clothes with one quick swipe, gripped her chest so that all her skin quickly stretched into his hand, and threw the bloody remains at our characters. Okay, that actually wound up sounding worse on paper than it looks on screen--and that's not to say it's not sick, 'cus it is, and hell I looked away for a moment. You know I don't like gore, but I can tollerate it--far as I'm concerned it's just another annoying thing in a movie, like a cheesy line, unless it has a tonal purpose or brings the plot forward somehow. (Yes, this is very possible.) And to boot, there were a few cheesy lines here, the worst probably being, "They say this town is haunted." "I think they're right." Eye-rolling! There's a number of moments inbetween the action that are like that, when you just wish that some bits of dialogue had been cut. The acting is great in some scenes, and truly awful in others--and I don't just mean some actors do well, some don't. I mean, the actors who do badly sometimes do really well, and vice versa. What's more annoying is Sean Bean's scenes, as the "token husband guy." They don't move the plot forward, they don't increase the tension...hell, they decrease it. They don't serve any purpose, and apparently they weren't originally supposed to be in the film at all. When the original script got turned in, some studio executive moron rejected it with the reply of, "There are no men!" So they were forced to put these scenes in with blathering, useless male characters. (Christophe Gans, the director, was very insistant on making the protagonist a female instead of a male like in the game, because he finds Silent Hill to be a "feminine" universe. I can't really describe why, but I feel that.) Overall, though, the script and acting wind up being tollerable enough. If the film wasn't so cool and well-directed then they'd be more bothersome, but thankfully, the good winds up outweighing the bad.
Okay, so what's so good if I liked it? Well, I could say that the story wound up being cool when it started to make sense, but really...I mainly just liked it for the presentation. The music, which was taken straight from the games, is really, really well-done. It's haunting, spooky, and sometimes you can't tell if it's really music or ambient sound--which is a good thing for something like this. Then there's the cool sets, which get even cooler when the mysterious siren sounds and they're morphed by the Darkness. And then there's the monsters. MAN, I loved the monsters. I think it's safe to say that these are some of the coolest, most realistic-looking monsters I've ever seen in a film. They look so great because, contrary to popular belief, they're almost entirely made of prosthetics. CG monsters and sets just can't always cut it, and this shows in "Silent Hill," a wonderful example of the greatness of old-school effects. But it's not just that the different elements are cool, it's also that they come together well. The monsters fit the sets. The lighting and camerawork works more often that it doesn't, and in some scenes is just absolutely spactacular. The climax in particular is one of the most visually original scenes I've ever sceen in a film--it seems almost classic. Hell, it was the sickest scene in the film but it wound up being one of my favorites because of how f*****g awesome it was. But other scenes have it, too--there are so many shots in this film that are just brilliant, wonderfully surreal and yet clear enough. I read that in some scenes were taken shot-for-shot from the games, with the sets replicating the games' environments. "Silent Hill" may change its protagonists' gender, but in many other respects it is reportedly very, very faithful to its source material--a first in game to film adaptations. Interestingly, it's also well-made--another first in game to film adaptations. Gans really seems to have a genuine passion for the material, and despite the occasional annoying bits of dialogue, the movie just really works. It's spooky, it makes you wonder what's going to happen (thankfully I didn't spoil the story for myself--didn't read those reviews), and it is just plain cool from start to finish. Now, I can definately see a lot of people really not liking this film, and that I can understand, but it's waaaay better than any other game adaptation, and is worth seeing for the visuals alone, even if it's definately flawed. See, other game adaptations have been bad not only because of their flaws, but because of their inability to bring what was so good about the games to the screen. I mean, s**t, "Doom III" was a gorgeous game, but the film was uglier than the result of a weight-watchers meeting hit by a radioactive comet. But "Silent Hill" definately has strengths. It's not good at everything that it does, but it does a few things really, really well (atmosphere, monsters, visuals, story, etc.) and keeps the rest in check juuuust enough for it to be passable. And that, in my opinion, automatically puts it a notch up over something like, saaaaay, fan favorite "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith," which was absolutely TERRIBLE in every respect except for the visuals. (5 second pauses between every badly acted, badly written line of cheezoid dialogue is unforgivable, no matter how cool lightsaber fighting is.) But then, I have strange taste. Heh.
Let this be a reminder to all those naysayers who say a game to film adaptation can't work. It can work--all you need is passion, talent, etc. You know, all the stuff necessary for films in the first place.
26 Apr 2006, 2:34 am
To be honest, I was really kinda worried when going into "Silent Hill." First of all, we'd gotten there just before the trailers started, and I thought that they already had started before we walked in. Second of all, this was a game adaptation. Third of all...well, most of the reviews I'd read had been pretty damn positive, but all had said that the film was disturbing and gory as hell. Okay, so why was I seeing it? Two words: cool monsters. Kind of a lame reason, I know, but based on what I'd seen in footage from the film (and the games), the monsters looked flat-out badass. Also, I just wanted to see if this was indeed a good game adaptation. I mean, I'd thought "Doom" was kind of a fun action movie, but that was in part because my expectations were so low (rarely do I rent a film that I expect to be that bad), and I can't deny that that movie was full of problems. I was bothered, though, by the local paper's recent review of "Silent Hill"--they'd given it the chair. (Instead of a number of stars, the SF Chronicle has a little man in a chair. An empty chair is basically one star; he's sleeping if it's two stars; clapping if it's four; acting like a seal if it's five; etc.) If that many people loved it (as shown on the IMDB reviews), then it couldn't be worth the chair, especially since you had to at least give the film credit for the great visuals shown in the trailers and clips. I'd decided not to pay that review much attention, though, because the author spent a majority of the first page just complaining about the film being two hours and five minutes rather than an hour and a half. Oh, please. The standard running time is about two hours and fifteen minutes these days--maybe not for horror movies or comedies, but seriously, so many films in the past few years have been over two hours. When a review's main criticism is that the film is the standard length rather than 80 minutes, I find it hard to take that opinion too seriously.
Okay. The previews ended with that great new "Da Vinci Code" trailer (very excited about that one, loved da book, even if the Merovingians didn't have any middle eastern blood), and then the movie was starting. The lights faded, but annoyingly the "Exit" signs stayed on, and kind of disrupted the mood. Man, this is the sorta movie that needs to be seen in the dark! Stupid Exit signs. And stupid people bringing their baby in here. For crissakes, just because there's a little girl on the poster (al bit one without a mouth) it doesn't mean it's a kid's movie! Hells no. But, then, there's at least one crying little kid or baby at practically every movie I see in theaters, and most movies I see these days are R, and the ones that aren't tend to be generally hard PG-13. (Half the movies that come out are R, so don't blame me.) Parents are dumb.
So...how was it? Did it disturb the hell out of me? Could I sleep that night?
Short version: I liked it. I liked it a lot. But no, I couldn't sleep because I can never sleep, and these days tend to go to sleep at about two despite going to bed at ten or eleven. Damn hormones funking my body up.
In case you have no idea what "Silent Hill" is about, well, the story starts off kinda simple. Rose is worried about her creepy sleep walking adopted daughter named Sharon (Rose...Sharon...get it? Rose of Sharon! Possible Stienbeckian reference?). Sharon screams "Silent Hill!! !!" in her sleepwalks, so Rose brings her to the ghost town of that name--which, it just so happens, is haunted. Well, of course they're immidiately separated and before too long, Rose is being bombarded by ashy grey babies with huge crying mouths, a big dude with a pyramid for a head and a big f***' sword, and other monsters that simply defy explaination. The mystery here winds up turning out pretty interesting, and unlike a lot of critics, I understood the story fine. (Funny how that always happens.) You just gotta get past that this isn't the real world--this is more of the nightmare world. This is a world where ideas are physically manifested, where demons really do exist, and where people are trapped in a single moment in time forever. People don't behave rationally, but as they do when they're too stressed to think, or as they do when they are in dreams--as though they are guided by some mysterious force. A script, probably. Hahahah! No, seriously, don't you ever feel as though some invisible thing is sometimes guiding you in dreams and nightmares? It's like that here. Only in this case, these characters actually are under interesting influences.
It's indeed a pretty sick movie. I didn't think it'd be too bad at the start, because while the monster designs are wonderfully twisted, there's almost no blood or gore for the first hour and twenty minutes. But then the yucko scenes start kicking in. See, rather than having an overabundance of gore, "Silent Hill" is subtler. It focuses more on having fun buildup to brief scenes of creative, clever carnage, each one more disturbing than the last. The buildup is always juuuust long enough for the grisley moments to catch you off guard (unless you already knew where they were due to spoiling yourself silly, or something), but you don't have long, lingering shots, so it's rarely boring. I wouldn't say that it pushes the limits of the R rating, because I've seen loads of other films that I've found more disturbing and/or bloody. (I don't really understand the arguement that films aren't gory enough these days--they're gorier than ever, guys! Yeah, there are some PG-13 horror movies, but Christ, I've seen more movie blood recently than I want to admit.) That said, the few gory scenes are all pretty f*** disturbing in their own right, and combined with monsters that most people will probably be quite bothered by, it's not a film for the most feint of heart. Now, I wasn't too scared so much as disguisted, in part because I was too busy going "coooool" at the visuals, and in part because I'd spoiled myself silly with reviews and clips and trailers and video previews and featurettes (all seen in an effort to decide whether or not to risk seeing this potentially traumatizing film in theaters--or at least that was my excuse, heh), so I knew way too much of what was going to happen. See, that kills fear. A huge part of fear is being afraid of fear itself, and while I dreaded the "pyramid head ripping somebody's skin off" scene I'd read about, the fact that I knew what was coming at all made the film loose a lot of its power--especially since I have a tendency to imagine things worse than they could ever be in a film. The skin ripping scene, while definately nasty, was so brief that when it was over, I was relieved more than anything. I mean, I was picturing the Pyramid Head taking his big sword and slowly peeling some poor woman's arm flesh off with it, peeling it off inches at a time, and of course the necessary screams of horror and showers of blood. But no. Rather, he just kinda removed her clothes with one quick swipe, gripped her chest so that all her skin quickly stretched into his hand, and threw the bloody remains at our characters. Okay, that actually wound up sounding worse on paper than it looks on screen--and that's not to say it's not sick, 'cus it is, and hell I looked away for a moment. You know I don't like gore, but I can tollerate it--far as I'm concerned it's just another annoying thing in a movie, like a cheesy line, unless it has a tonal purpose or brings the plot forward somehow. (Yes, this is very possible.) And to boot, there were a few cheesy lines here, the worst probably being, "They say this town is haunted." "I think they're right." Eye-rolling! There's a number of moments inbetween the action that are like that, when you just wish that some bits of dialogue had been cut. The acting is great in some scenes, and truly awful in others--and I don't just mean some actors do well, some don't. I mean, the actors who do badly sometimes do really well, and vice versa. What's more annoying is Sean Bean's scenes, as the "token husband guy." They don't move the plot forward, they don't increase the tension...hell, they decrease it. They don't serve any purpose, and apparently they weren't originally supposed to be in the film at all. When the original script got turned in, some studio executive moron rejected it with the reply of, "There are no men!" So they were forced to put these scenes in with blathering, useless male characters. (Christophe Gans, the director, was very insistant on making the protagonist a female instead of a male like in the game, because he finds Silent Hill to be a "feminine" universe. I can't really describe why, but I feel that.) Overall, though, the script and acting wind up being tollerable enough. If the film wasn't so cool and well-directed then they'd be more bothersome, but thankfully, the good winds up outweighing the bad.
Okay, so what's so good if I liked it? Well, I could say that the story wound up being cool when it started to make sense, but really...I mainly just liked it for the presentation. The music, which was taken straight from the games, is really, really well-done. It's haunting, spooky, and sometimes you can't tell if it's really music or ambient sound--which is a good thing for something like this. Then there's the cool sets, which get even cooler when the mysterious siren sounds and they're morphed by the Darkness. And then there's the monsters. MAN, I loved the monsters. I think it's safe to say that these are some of the coolest, most realistic-looking monsters I've ever seen in a film. They look so great because, contrary to popular belief, they're almost entirely made of prosthetics. CG monsters and sets just can't always cut it, and this shows in "Silent Hill," a wonderful example of the greatness of old-school effects. But it's not just that the different elements are cool, it's also that they come together well. The monsters fit the sets. The lighting and camerawork works more often that it doesn't, and in some scenes is just absolutely spactacular. The climax in particular is one of the most visually original scenes I've ever sceen in a film--it seems almost classic. Hell, it was the sickest scene in the film but it wound up being one of my favorites because of how f*** awesome it was. But other scenes have it, too--there are so many shots in this film that are just brilliant, wonderfully surreal and yet clear enough. I read that in some scenes were taken shot-for-shot from the games, with the sets replicating the games' environments. "Silent Hill" may change its protagonists' gender, but in many other respects it is reportedly very, very faithful to its source material--a first in game to film adaptations. Interestingly, it's also well-made--another first in game to film adaptations. Gans really seems to have a genuine passion for the material, and despite the occasional annoying bits of dialogue, the movie just really works. It's spooky, it makes you wonder what's going to happen (thankfully I didn't spoil the story for myself--didn't read those reviews), and it is just plain cool from start to finish. Now, I can definately see a lot of people really not liking this film, and that I can understand, but it's waaaay better than any other game adaptation, and is worth seeing for the visuals alone, even if it's definately flawed. See, other game adaptations have been bad not only because of their flaws, but because of their inability to bring what was so good about the games to the screen. I mean, s**t, "Doom III" was a gorgeous game, but the film was uglier than the result of a weight-watchers meeting hit by a radioactive comet. But "Silent Hill" definately has strengths. It's not good at everything that it does, but it does a few things really, really well (atmosphere, monsters, visuals, story, etc.) and keeps the rest in check juuuust enough for it to be passable. And that, in my opinion, automatically puts it a notch up over something like, saaaaay, fan favorite "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith," which was absolutely TERRIBLE in every respect except for the visuals. (5 second pauses between every badly acted, badly written line of cheezoid dialogue is unforgivable, no matter how cool lightsaber fighting is.) But then, I have strange taste. Heh.
Let this be a reminder to all those naysayers who say a game to film adaptation can't work. It can work--all you need is passion, talent, etc. You know, all the stuff necessary for films in the first place.
wow long post. I'm assuming you liked it then?
06 Sep 2006, 6:19 pm
Personally, I prefer the games. A lot more psychological horror, whereas the films were more schlock. However, not a bad adaptation per se.
You see, a friend of mine went to Vietnam, and bought a DVD of Silent Hill for me (as I'd mentioned to her that I'd like to see it, although I didn't know she'd get a DVD of it). Of course, it was a pirated copy that misses out the second fifth of the film and was filmed in a cinema, but it was enough to have some sort of judgement on it. That skin-ripping scene was gory (was never a fan of horror films and gore, meself, just psychological horror), but the climax is even worse. I'll try not to spoil it, but lemme say this: I'll never look at barbed wire in the same way again.
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07 Sep 2006, 10:29 pm
I ended up seeing it a couple weeks ago and just know that if you have played Silent Hill 1, 2, and 3, you'll probably like it. Then again if you bring a friend who's a bit of a movie cynic expect that they won't get the same connection - to them it'll just look like some real corny 80's Steven King type of movie. I just bought Silent Hill 1 a couple weeks ago and they definitely pulled most of the elements from that.
The movie overall IMO was alright, I really liked the idea of how they had the skin of that reality litterally become the monsters once it peeled off - interesting touch. The end explanation of things wasn't that bad either. The only thing I didn't like was the very end - kinda for the same reasons I really didn't like the very end of 13th Ghost.
On the bright side though if you play Silent Hills the nice thing about the videogames is they keep you guessing all the way through and even after its over it still doesn't make a lot of sense - keeps you pulled in there at least. Especially SH2, me and my roommate sat there and beat it when it first came out, true it only took 10 hours but still, it was like Davinci Code or something. We couldn't figure out what was shadier - the living characters or the monsters, were trying to figure out the character events and what the heck they meant, very interesting stuff.
