Christophe Gans is no doubt a fan of the Silent Hill video games. He reportedly fought to secure the director position for the 2006 Silent Hill with Radha Mitchell and Sean Bean because he cared about the adaptation so much. Well, as we know, that movie didn’t do so great at the box office or with audiences. I’m the first to admit that it holds a special place in my heart and I own it and watch it periodically. But I’m also the first to admit that it’s just not great. I like it and revisit it because I’m a fan of the games. So, when I heard that he was going to try again and adapt the story of the greatest installment in the franchise – Silent Hill 2 – I was excited but kept my expectations low. Was that the right call? Well, read on and I’ll tell you! Let’s get into it, shall we?
James Sunderland is a widower who receives a mysterious message from his late wife to return to her home town of Silent Hill. When he arrives, the town is essentially deserted. He runs into a weirdo in a partially submerged cemetery and an apparently homeless guy (yelling harbinger of doom shit) fairly quickly, but then nobody for a long while after that. Amid flashbacks and dead wife voiceovers, he searches for clues to his wife’s whereabouts in the town. Unfortunately, this town ain’t quite right. There are faceless monsters, visibility obliterating fog, and sometimes James’ surroundings become plunged into darkness and decay right before his eyes. To make matters worse, there is a brute stalking him with a metal pyramid on its head and a huge blade. As James finds new clues and stays one step ahead of Pyramid Head, he crosses paths with a slovenly psychopath, a sexy doppelganger of his wife, and a strange kid. Is any of this real? Are these people trustworthy? Is he damned? It’s a mystery!
The good, the bad, and the ugly. Let me start with the good. Gans has pretty faithfully recreated the Silent Hill of the second game – the characters, the town, the individual locations, the monsters, and the disorientation. He obviously did his homework and it shows. He didn’t include the puzzles that are so integral to the videogames, but that’s understandable as they probably don’t make for exciting film. Now, the bad. The acting is amateurish at best. I applaud the use of unknown actors though. Especially because it probably means that without big names and their big name contracts, Gans could keep more creative control over the story. But there must be better unknown actors out there. And in an effort to include all of the characters from the game, Gans included Eddie (the slovenly psycho). That’s fine. That’s good even. But… Eddie has zero effect on the story and runs off after only a minute of screentime. That is not the case in the game. The character ends up feeling shoehorned in to check a box and that’s unfortunate. Given that this adaptation feels very “on rails” going from one location to the next with a trickle of backstory through flashbacks, that is especially unfortunate. The Eddie character could have helped add a little more “meat” to this story. A story already simplified for a wide audience. (if you’re not familiar, the game is rife with psychosexual imagery and a palpable sense of James’ guilt) And finally, the ugly. The CGI is awful. It is weightless and textureless and very overused. It’s such a shame because a few carefully crafted practical effects and more practical creatures would have bumped this clunker up at least one more notch.
The Final Cut: Return to Silent Hill is a faithful but flawed adaptation of the stellar Silent Hill 2 videogame. Poor acting, a barebones story adaptation, and laughably bad CGI hamstring this effort too much to be enjoyable even for hardcore Silent Hill fans.
