Here's all
you need to know about Silent Hill:Revelation. A guy three rows behind
me fell into such a deep slumber that he snored
through about 30 minutes of the film.
On to the
review!
For the rest
of my life, I am only going to refer to this film as Silent Hill: Exposition. I'm
aware that exposition can serve a positive purpose in catching the viewers up
on something important. The idea is to
prevent having to add scene after and dragging the movie down. However, you run the risk of going too far in
the other direction. Now, we suddenly
have every character spoon-feeding the audience everything they need to know. In case you didn't know, this kind of kills a
film's momentum.
Silent Hill: Exposition isn't a bad
movie, per-se. The action scenes are fantastic,
the creatures are truly creepy (especially the doll-spider), and there is an
interesting plot. It's just that the
plot is buried under poor acting, too much talking, lots of standing around and
some of the cheesiest twists I've ever seen.
Much of it
can be blamed on the acting. It's hard
to blame the actors per se, considering they're the likes of Sean Bean,
Carrie-Anne Moss and Malcolm McDowell.
So I'll go ahead and say that poor director Mark Tonderai was in waaaaay
over his head. Sean Bean is especially
wretched as Harry, the father of our titular hero. He keeps dropping his American accent and
mixing in his native Queen's English, but it gets so muddled that at one point
I was convinced he'd decided to play a Russian immigrant.
Malcolm
McDowell and Miss Moss aren't quite as
terrible. I think they were given so little to work with they ended up just
showing up, getting their money, and calling it a day.
I can't be as
nice to our two primary characters, however.
Adelaide Clemens (Heather) isn't very good at all, and her character
development is painfully ridiculous. We
sort of need her to be someone we can root for, since she's, y'know, the main
character and all. It's a shame that all
I could do was laugh at the ridiculous.
Then there's
Vincent, played by Kit Harington. To say
he's instrumental to the plot would be an understatement, but at no point in
the movie did I give a flying pig's ass about whether he lived or died.
As for the
plot itself, it's pretty straightforward.
Years after Heather's mother sacrificed herself to get Heather out of
Silent Hill, Heather and Harry are constantly on the run. There's a crazed cult that wants to drag
Heather back to Silent Hill for a dark ritual, and Harry's not big on that
idea.
Of course,
Heather has complete amnesia about the whole incident, and she just believes that
she and her father are on the run from the law after Harry killed one of the cultists
in their home.
Yadda yadda,
blah blah, that doesn't work out, Harry gets kidnapped, and Heather recruits
Vincent to help her get to Silent Hill and rescue her father.
The beginning
is silly, the middle is apparently snore-worthy, and the ending is
laughable. Strangely enough, there
really is a lot to like if you're a Silent Hill fan. There are tons of nods to the video game
franchise, and the creatures really are
amazing. Someone put a lot of love into
the crazy demons, and it shows. The
nurses are especially fantastic, and I wouldn't have minded just seeing a 90 minute
film that followed Pyramid Head around while he violently interacted with
crazier and crazier critters.
If you still
want to go see Silent Hill: Exposition
then you absolutely must do it in 3D.
The effects make it worth your time, and it takes a few good scenes and
makes them phenomenal. Unfortunately for
us and the future prospects of this film, none of those scenes involve a single
main character being particularly useful.
As someone
who loves the Silent Hill games (but
sucks at them), enjoyed the first Silent
Hill and still quests for good scares, I can tell you that this film would
make a perfectly adequate rental.
Still nowhere
near as good as Sinister though.
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