Trailer365: Silent Hill

Day 63: Silent Hill (2006) [Original Post]

Games On Film: Silent Hill (2006)

Like a bewildered protagonist from one of the Silent Hill games, I routinely find myself staggering through fog, hoping to somehow relive the past in present form. It's been three years since the Silent Hill movie first hit cinemas, and despite much blustering about a potential sequel, such a film has failed to materialize. (Not even in creepy devil-clone form!)

Recent discussions on the blog have meandered toward the comparisons between video games and film.
Silent Hill in particular draws inevitable comparison with it's heavily derived film references, both thematically, and in presentation. Tekken will be the slightly less obvious franchise to make the jump next with a release date of August, but first, a little history...

With a wide array of critical pannings, and an uninspiring take at the box office, it's a fairly unremarkable situation for a film like this to find itself in.
The film's 2002 survival horror predecessor, Resident Evil, found similar fortunes, but was reanimated by a strong audience discovered after-the-fact on DVD. The two sequels that followed performed moderately stronger than the first, but were also financially unspectacular.

1993 saw the first major debut of a gaming property on big screen with the lacklustre release of Super Mario Bros.The film failed to capitalize on the runaway success of the console franchise, setting a grim tone for the future of other series that would attempt the same. In 1994, Double Dragon and Street Fighter fared no better than their platforming compadres, but the '95 release of Mortal Kombat turned a corner to give fans and producers a glimmer of hope. According to Box Office Mojo; the current highest grossing video game films are: Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), Pokemon: The First Movie (1999), and Mortal Kombat (1995). #1, Tomb Raider, attracted $50m on it's opening weekend, a number tripled by record setting genre rivals, The Dark Knight (2008) and Spider-man 3 (2007).

Cut any way you like -- the numbers associated with video game films, unfortunately, support the popular misconception that they are all doomed to failure. This overwhelming evidence does not, however, refute the fact that it's absolutely ridiculous to summarily condemn gaming films with the assumption that interactive quotas render the two mediums incompatible.

Silent Hill, for all it's faults, makes a fairly bold attempt at justifying the prospect of games on film.
I would personally be inclined to compare it to Iron Man; the contrastingly successful Marvel comics blockbuster of 2008. Iron Man garnered unanticipated success in both the critical and financial landscapes, despite being a fairly run-of-the-mill superhero action film.
The great success Iron Man produced was a greater acceptance and understanding of the visual flair and spirit behind these franchise adaptations. Iron Man was as colourful and impractical as his comic book counterpart, lovingly realised with many of the same suspensions of disbelief that have made the character an icon for decades.

French director, Christophe Gans, made a similar gesture with his ill-fated Silent Hill film.
The story lacked the inherent charm of lumbering video game FMVs, instead serving up much more familiar versions of boredom with it's conventional opening scenes. A spine throughout the film draws viewers out of the secluded town regularly for similarly mediocre deviations into the life of a desperate supporting character -- something potentially paid-off in a sequel, but unappreciated in the one-off experience. Then there's the end, which just plain falls apart, stripping away at the alluring mystery of the film to borrow the most cockamamie elements of the game.

As much as these mediocrities intrude upon the overall image of the movie, they should not blind any viewer to the truffled morsels of unrivalled deliciousness that lie within the film. Sure, you've got your fanboy pops like the sewer zombie horde in Resident Evil, the martial arts and ice blasts of Sub-Zero in Mortal Kombat, and Angelina Jolie's, well, boobs, in Tomb Raider, but I'm not sure any of those can measure up to the rusted macabre of Silent Hill. Radha Mitchell puts in a strong turn as the patchworked heroine, but everybody knows the real hero of the movie is Pyramid Head!

From his disinterested slow march into the movie, to his mysterious retreat amidst one of the tense highpoints of action, the Pyramid Headed one is not the embodiment of sexual frustration, but rather everything glorious (and gory) about the Silent Hill film!

Though the visual design and faithful recreation of gaming iconography pose a striking argument for the film, it's the unnoticed, the time given to the non-space, that is quite possibly the thing that sets it above Resident Evil, and champions the influence of Christophe Gans.

It's hard to imagine an American director having the confidence and delicacy to approach the film with some of it's classic gaming references. While a complete lack of dialogue immerses gamers into their atmospheric experience, it's traditionally perceived as risky to leave that much dead air in a theatre. Gans not only boldly commands a character exclusively through her actions (and reactions), but also directs a film that relishes in it's lack of explanations, at least until the total breakdown of the third-act.

With an ending that left the door open for Sean Bean to return as a retro-fitted James Sunderland, a sequel promised to capitalize on the conceptual dialogue introduced in the film, allowing the movie to have faith in an audience's capacity to accept and understand the terraforming landscapes, Japanese infused horror, and thriller intensity.

The onus for failure or success is ultimately on the creative forces who often fail to steer close enough to the source material, failing in ways comparable films (like Iron Man) haven't. Taken in isolation, much of the second-act of Silent Hill proves exactly why video games are just as viable as any other film adaptation, be they comic book, novel, or amusement ride (ie; Pirates of the Caribbean). All these mediums share the same building blocks of character and concept, and consequently, with the right creative vision, are interchangeable.

Any fan with an inclination toward the ideas of Silent Hill owes it to themselves to see the film, if they haven't. If they have, they should consider taking another look, with special care to note the possibilities brimming within the very best moments of the film. When it's good, it's truly exceptional!

A spoiler-laden trailer does little to convey Silent Hill at it's unconventional and atmospheric best.

AdVantage Point: Silent Hill Homecoming (2008)

Give an idiot a scanner and a comic book and let him to pick out all the advertisements for video games. This is AdVantage Point -- a chance to document the winding timeline of comics/gaming history as it was canonized by the adverts. Musings, rantings, observations, stream of consciousness.

 

Is it just me, or is there something about Silent Hill that always makes it seem older than it actually is? It's hard to believe 2009 is only the tenth anniversary of the first game!

Homecoming, the US-developed combat heavy instalment in the series, now becomes a distant footnote as we look forward to the latest version of the much loved series. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories throws players back into the embattered role of Harry Mason, who awakes from a car accident to find his adopted daughter missing and a foggy mystery awaiting him in the depths of the mysterious titular town.

Just like in Soviet Russia, the reimagining of the original 1999 PSX classic promises to be a game that plays YOU! By utilizing cutting edge technology, the game will constantly evaluate the psychological profile indicated by a player's decisions, creating deviations that respond to the behaviours exhibited. This new feature speaks to the intense immersion intended for the game, which now pipes trademark eerie static directly through the Wiimote speaker, and encourages players to fiddle with locks, and be distracted during conversations, seamlessly blending puzzles, cut scenes, and assessments, with live gameplay.

Generally speaking, I'm firmly against the very notion of remakes.

With a background in comic books, my perspective is one appreciative of the value of accumulated storytelling and on-going developments.
Sitting somewhere between the slow and expensive production of feature films, and the serialized accessibility of longer running comics, I often lean toward observing games through the conventions of comics as a reference base for viable long running development. In that respect, I think characters, (even ones that are actually spooky towns), deserve the chance to develop their story at every available junction, always moving forward, instead of lazily cashing in on uninventive repetition.

There's no denying the creative stagnancy of remakes, but Silent Hill: Shattered Memories really makes an effort to buck the negatives, defying even the staunchest critic with a game that imbues the spirit of the original with an entirely fresh perspective.

Admittedly, I'm a little curious as to why this game couldn't have been a brand new instalment in the series, but am willing to bet the radical shift in design might have played a part in that, built on the hopes of using the familiar to ease fans into something seemingly antithetical to the Silent Hill franchise.
I, of course, am referring to the dismissal of the trademark septic rusting that indicated to players their world was about to be turned upside down and inside out. While the hellacious faceless monsters remain; Shattered Memories favours an icey cold loneliness to spook players, taking full advantage of the game's cumulative assessment to play to a very different type of horror.

 

With so many interactive gimmicks and the prospect of a whole new presentation, it's really very hard to resist the charms, regardless of the game's status as a remake. Far from redundant for these facts, one wonders if the Shattered Memories moniker isn't a specific reference to the justification of the game. While it deliberately draws upon the first in the series, is it possible we're about to get a revised truth, or fractured reality in the Silent Hill canon?

I'm keen to find out!

Shattered Memories boasts a similar atmospheric solitude to it's famous predecessors, but really does tap in to a brand new scope of horror. For a franchise like this to remain successful, one could argue that this type of reinvention is necessary. The terraforming landscape of Silent Hill grants creators an opportunity to craft new experiences based upon the psychological underpinnings of the lead character in each game. By tapping in to the expected horror of Silent Hill, while undermining the fundamentals of the familiar, it recreates some of that fresh tension we all felt when first experiencing the franchise. To this end, it could be the most intriguing deviation in the series since the tangentially related sequel, The Room.

In response to today's AdVantage Point advert -- Shattered Memories also makes a deliberate decision to steer away from the cumbersome combat of the previous games. In opposition to Homecoming's expanded battling, Shattered Memories now encourages players to effectively speed run their way through locales, using the icy blue of the 'otherworld' to indicate paths through the expansive townscape.

All in all, it's a pleasant change of pace for any gamer like myself.
A game with a high concept and story-driven drive that actually makes the Nintendo Wii look like a more involving piece of hardware than it's plethora of novelty games. I regret that I'll probably cheap out to get the PS2 version, because I really can't imagine how it will be as successful as the Wiimote wielding version, which the game appears to have been built upon.

Original Post: http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=8995156