Silent Hill: Revelation 3D (2012)
Starring: Adelaide Clemens, Kit Harington, Deborah Kara Unger, Martin Donovan, Malcolm McDowell, Carrie-Anne Moss, Sean Bean
Category: new
Plot Tags: alternate world, kidnapping (kinda), video game adaptation
Original release: October 26th, 2012
Format viewed: Pre-screening via Ain't It Cool News
Directed by: Michael Bassett
Written by: Michael Bassett
Distributed by: Open Road Films, Lionsgate
Through Harry Knowles and the good folks at Ain't It Cool News, I was able to attend a prescreening Thursday night of Silent Hill: Revelations 3D prior to its release. I wouldn't claim to be a huge fan of the first film but I loved the PSP version of the game and was interested in the story overall (the mythology if you will) so I was excited to be included in this type of screening. Upon arrival I was greeted by two nurses all dressed up in bloody attire which was impressive, but considering they still had faces, not all the way game-style. It was 3D too so I was given glasses and then scanned with a metal detector (for some reason) prior to entry. In the theatre there were people dressed in costumes and others playing the new game on the movie screen. This was quite cool except for the fact that whomever was playing hadn't worked out the perspective of the character so she spent most of the time wandering the halls of the sanitarium looking as though she was trying to smell her shoulder.
After a costume contest, it was time to start the film. There were three little things telling you to put on your glasses. I was annoyed by this, thinking you'd have to be blind not to know at this point to put them on. Then it occurred to me that, if blind, you wouldn't get much out of a 3D movie. Slight chuckle. And onto the movie itself. Having the opening set into the main street of Silent Hill with the ash/snow looking stuff fluttering around was awfully neat. This is one of the more unnerving effects in the game, lulling you into a false sense of calm prior to crap careening towards a nearby fan. In this case however, they revert to a dream within a dream gimmick to set up that our main character Heather (Adelaide Clemens - who did a fine job with the script she had to work with) and her father Christopher (Sean Bean) are constantly moving to evade police. She thinks this is because of a murder that happened years ago, but in fact it is more to stay a step ahead of evil forces that seem to be after them. The trouble is that she keeps having dreams and seeing visions of freaky stuff that lead her to a realization that there is this alternate world (Silent Hill) where these things seem to come from. Now I could go on for pages and pages about the rest of the story but the gist is that Heather is the remainder of the rest of what was good in the girl taken in the first film. I think - I can't 100% remember but it basically boils down to the bad creatures in Silent Hill wanting her back to give the evil girl power but this cult of white haired weirdos wanting to kill her to keep that from happening. Or something along those lines. Again, to even come close to trying to explain the story would take for freaking ever and honestly, it isn't really worth the effort.
I was reminded of a thing John Waters once said about his mom. She and his father would come to screenings of some of his films and if you know anything about his films they aren't the typical fare for retired age middle America (via Baltimore) types. Anyway, his mom (grasping at a way to not be negative) would say 'well goodness, I don't know where they find the energy.' This is kind of what I feel like for this film overall. On the one hand, a lot of the visuals are really remarkable (Pyramidhead, the freaky nurses and the mannequin monster in particular) and how much the locations looked just like they did in the game are just remarkable, but on the other hand, my understanding of film making is that one should have a more or less serviceable script to use in making of said film. The actors all do fine, in particular Sean Bean and Adelaide Clemens, but often they are left to look a bit silly with very uninspired writing and setup scenes that deflate the scene they are there to set up. It's as if Akiva Goldsman had the weekend off and decided to hash out a horror script with a teenage girl troupe and a couple llamas for dictation. So many bad dialogue choices. Again, this takes a lot of suspense out of things when you're too busy rolling your eyes back into place after being hit with another stinker. This is a shame because the tension of the thing in parts could have been made all the better with a sharper, more dynamic script.
One last thing I'll say. Carrie-Anne Moss is great. She was just grand in the Matrix films and I loved that she was in one of my more favorite zombie meets Lassie type films, Fido, but seriously, casting her as the evil mother/demon/white haired lady was completely distracting. Every scene she was in was completely useless because she stuck out like a sore thumb. Again, she is great, but not in that role.
Overall, I was very glad and happy to be included in the screening via Harry and AICN and hope to get to go to more events. But, while this could have been a Cronenberg level brain freak out of a story, it ended up being very confusing a bunch of the time (and I knew the damned backstory) and devoid of suspense by and large and overall was an exhibit on how to make neat creatures and give them very little to do.
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