Silent Hill Revelation 3D Review

(Buy silent hill here)

From time to time, your pal Sir Jorge (me) gets sick. This week I got the flu, so in that case, I had a little help from a guest blogger. This guest blogger didn’t want to be named, just wanted a shot at posting on the old blog o rific, so without further adieu, here you go.

We dare to dream of the day that Hollywood will stop trying to make movies based on game sequels, but alas that day is yet to come…For the time being we’re forced to sit through a [yet another] mediocre and downright laughable cinematic version of one of the greatest horror game franchises that were to ever grace the face of this pitiful planet. KONAMI must really be regretting selling the rights to the franchise to an American company - now that the fellow Americans hold the legal rights to the game(s) and movie(s) all bets are off.

But onto the movie, we will see... It’s hard to write a coherent review for a movie that’s all over the place, so let’s just use the same approach to do it justice. This movie has no reason to exist. Period. After the dreaded and insufferable Silent Hill from 2006 a lot of game fans were convinced the making of films based on games had hit rock bottom and nothing worse could ever live to see daylight. Apparently scriptwriters, directors and visual artists in Hollywood mistook this for a personal challenge and thus - Revelation was born. Sometimes I think virtually every movie based on a game is doomed to failure and the guys from the East Coast seem pretty keen on proving me right (note: no, putting Angelina Jolie in the lead role does NOT a movie make or save; she’s freaking hot as hell, yes, but if I wanted to watch an hour long of a hot chick flashing her curves from every angle I’d just play me some random Sasha Grey clip).

As a religious fan of the game sequel I have to shamefully admit I was timidly hopeful for the second Silent Hill movie after having experienced one of the worst disappointments of my life sitting through the first (seriously, I wasn’t that upset when I found naked pictures and ongoing correspondence of my boyfriend with his ex, leading to an ugly break-up). Further to this the fact that it would be loosely based on the third installment of the game series, which is one of the strongest and sickest in the sequence, only added to that adorable pitter-patter of my heart and the butterfly feeling in my stomach. By the time the credits appeared on the screen I was deeply pensive about whether to pull a James Holmes on the theatre (alright, this was completely inappropriate in the light of the recent events, but you get what I am trying to say) or go home and slit my wrists with broken DVD pieces.

See? I promised you a review as coherent as the movie and so far I think I’m delivering. In all seriousness, though, the movie is all over the place - like literally. There isn’t the slightest effort from part of the script-writer to put together anything even remotely decent in terms of background story (the glue that hold together all Silent Hill-related stories no matter how irrelevant or unrelated they might seem in the beginning) and the director has only assisted with throwing in here and there random images in the spirit of the game franchise. Apart from recognizing some of the series most infamous monsters there is little that the fans will be able to relate to. As if in a meek attempt to block out these flukes, several up-and-coming and one or two famous actors have been thrown in the movie, but they’re just as out of place as everything else. Almost all of the casting of ‘Game of Thrones’ is present, which goes on to prove that when the industry has decided to promote someone, they’re going to promote the living shit out of them - even if that person can’t act to save his life (which is kind of ironic since one of the actors in question does die in the movie…and in ‘Game of Thrones’ for that matter. Wonder if it was due to bad acting). Carrie Anne Moss hasn’t acted in a scene as laughable as the infamous last dialogue with Neo from the 3rd Matrix, where he tells her she can’t die, but she argues that she can and dies, until now.

Things are not looking good in the soundtrack department either, which is baffling to say the least. With a monumentally genius composer like Akira Yamaoka, who single-handedly ensured that musically Silent Hill is just as eerie and disturbing as the story and gameplay intended it to be, the music to the movie is nothing like any of the brilliant tracks we get to experience in the games.

Without spoiling the movie for those who will bravely venture into the theatre to catch a glimpse of the abomination that it is, let me just shout out a fair warning to all faithful game fans - the notorious, but beloved Pyramid Head appears in the most unimaginably grotesque (not in a good) way - one that will leave you with nightmares for weeks to come and will possibly result in several shrink appointments.

The general atmosphere of the movie is dark and somber, albeit in a way that has little to do with the sad hopelessness that the games used to make the player care. You will find it doesn’t really matter whether the characters live or die and will fail to be thrilled by their personal tragedies, which are told in a more of a soap-opera-drama style. The safest choice you could make is to take my word that the best thing about this movie is the poster and move on with your life.