Gameology 2.0

After some false starts, I finally got around to seeing the new Silent Hill movie which just came out. Based on Konami’s uber-creepy survival horror series, it corrects a lot of flaws video game movies tend to have. Decent acting, interesting characters, ludicrously gib worthy kills, and a faithfulness to the feel of the game help the flick out, but a weak ending hurts it. Still, the director does a fine job of getting a nice visual look to the film and the use of music from the video games is very effective. If you’ve played any of the games or if you like horror movies of the gory/trippy/gothic variety, rush to the theater to see the movie.

I really feel like I can’t talk much about this movie without spoiling things, so here’s a warning:

**** SPOILER WARNING ***** SPOILER WARNING ******

The first half of this movie is great, following the basic plot of the original PSX game to the letter. Certain camera angles are presented the same way they are in the game and the creepiness of the alternate reality sequences really capture the same “what the hell?” feeling the games had.

Unfortunately, a sequence near the end makes a mistake so fatal that it almost kills the movie on the spot– obstrusive American horror movie style exposition, which explains in overly clear terms the backstory of the main characters. There were hints in the movie as to the back story that a regular horror film fan or survival horror game fan could figure out the missing pieces, but to be whacked over the head with a 10 minute rambling sequence is just obnoxious and insulting to the audience’s intelligence.

The whole subplot with Sean Bean feels very tacked on, almost as an excuse to introduce more male characters into the script. It pays off nicely with an open-ended finale that works quite well, but having a regular guy investigate a town’s spooky past pales in comparison to the phantasmagoric nightmares encountered in the film’s main storyline.

On a random note, my friends and I were talking about the movie afterwards and one of them made an excellent point regarding one of the movie’s better sequences where the vicious Pyramid Head creature grabs a woman, tears her clothes off, rips her skin off, then tosses the skin towards the door of a church like a discarded trash bag.

What was fascinating was the audience’s response to the scene– there was an audible gasp when the woman’s clothes were torn off and you saw her nude for a brief moment, but there was no real reaction to the ultra violence which occurs around the nudity. One person yelled out “This movie is sick…” with a negative connotation afterwards, but that was it. How is it that nudity gets more of a reaction than ultra violence?

All complaints aside, Silent Hill is by far the best video game movie to date because it gets the mood of the games down pat-- something most video game movies tend to ignore.