Transitions

D. Riley: The visuals were absolutely outstanding. A+. Especially the "opening" sequence of her entrance into Silent Hill (and the nightmare transition). Almost frame for frame from the game. Perfectly rendered. I kept thinking "this is what it would look like if Konami had this technology ten years ago." I thought the visual (and aural) presentation couldn't be beat. 'Announcing' Pyramid Head with the drag of the knife was classic.
G. Turner: I was surprised to see their take on the 'Nightmare' transition.
D. Riley: The peeling off of everything?
G. Turner: Yeah.
D. Riley: It's not what I would've expected, but I thought it was appropriate. You can hardly fade to black or go through a door into a "Please wait: loading" in a movie.
G. Turner: Very true, but I was still a bit taken aback by it. The 'surprise!' of unveiling the nightmare realm had more or less become a motif in the game, regardless of whether it grew from technical necessity.
D. Riley: I don't remember if this exactly happened in the film, but the first time it changed it was more of a "woah" moment, wasn't it?
G. Turner: That's a good question, one that I can't recall either. I believe it happened around her, but the frame was so dark that you didn't really get the full effect. If I remember correctly, it was a bit after the blue babies.
D. Riley: Well, the first change was just before that, when she's going down the stairs.
G. Turner: Oh, yes.
D. Riley: That's more in-tune with the game, if I recall correctly. The lights go out and she puts up the lighter, just like Harry Mason before her. Yet neither of them ever smoked.
D. Riley: I never understood that in movies. My whole life I've known all of one person who carried a lighter, but didn't smoke. And he only did it to give lights to hot chicks at parties.
G. Turner: Luckily it's a Zippo so it won't melt after, say, one minute of use.
D. Riley: Wind-proof, water-proof, Nightmare Silent Hill-proof?
G. Turner: Sure, why not!

Ruined, or Better?

D. Riley: I took exception with Pyramid Head's inclusion in the movie, as I did with the rest of the Silent Hill 2 baddies, like the 'vagina monsters' in the very beginning (the cop shoots one on the road) and the nurses at the end. They sort of dumbed down the very obvious vagina on the Patient demons for the film.
D. Riley: Not that nurses aren't in all of the games, but the ones in the movie are clearly the latex/plastic nurses from the second game.
G. Turner: Right, the nurses' designs definitely have a Silent Hill 2 look.
D. Riley: And I understand why they were used, because Silent Hill 2 really did have the most visually striking monsters, but at the same time, they're so intricately tied to Silent Hill 2 that it's a little irksome to see them in a place they don't belong. Regardless of the fact that they're creepy as hell. It's like how the opening melody to Requiem for a Dream is used in every other movie trailer.
G. Turner: I don't really have any qualm with the design changes. Frankly, my biggest nit to pick was with the 'swarms' of creatures. Having so many in the frame instead of sprinkling a few in the scenes definitely curbed the effect for me.
D. Riley: I loved the nurses at the end, even if they were all Michael Jackson's Thriller-esque. The patient demons swarming over the cliff I probably could've dealt without.
G. Turner: Yeah, that seemed a bit uninspired. I wasn't so hot on the whole room of blue babies either.
D. Riley: But that's basically how it was in the first game too. You really do get swarmed with them. So that I can cope with.
G. Turner: I don't remember that at all. I only recall maybe two, three at a time at most. Maybe it was different on Hard.
D. Riley: That I can't remember this exactly is a little distressing because I've started playing the game again just this week... but there's at least three or four that swarm you in the opening scene (when you're supposed to die). The idea being that it's inescapable, I guess. And really, by movie logic, things are only scary if there's scores of them.
G. Turner: What about the use of the town and its burning coal mines, instead of the more nebulous Silent Hill we always play in?
D. Riley: I thought the coal fires was a good enough movie reason, but my exceptions with it basically lead to my problem with the film as a whole. I don't understand why they decided to make Silent Hill 1's story if they were just going to neuter it, when Silent Hill 2's story (which is equally good or better) requires much less effort on the user.
D. Riley: My biggest problem was changing the cult from seriously evil "we're going to resurrect our dark god" to just plain crazy "we're silly fundamentalists, look at us go! Burn the witch!" Removing every single reference to the fact that, yes, Alessa has the soul of a devil in her kind of ruins the story.
G. Turner: Ruins it, or makes it better?!
D. Riley: Silent Hill 1 is very unforgiving. I hate to say it, because it's a really trite thing to say, but Silent Hill 1 was a story that you had to want to like.
G. Turner: No kidding. I'm very forgiving when it comes to embracing inaccessible stories, stories that require scrutinizing subtext, wild suspension of disbelief, or obscure references and cruel twists, but even I felt terribly unsatisfied with Silent Hill 1. In fact, so much so that I didn't bother to take a stab at an ending better than 'This wasn't supposed to happen'.
D. Riley: I'm the opposite. I devoured Silent Hill 1's story. I loved every minute of it, and I'll confidently say that I am one of the world wide interweb's foremost experts on it. Regardless, I could understand why you, or anyone really, would come away with a bad taste in your mouth. It's totally obscure, and what's not vague is often so outstandingly byzantine.
G. Turner: For the benefit of my addled memory, and for those who haven't played (and have no intention of playing) the first game, can you give us a summary of Silent Hill 1?
D. Riley: I'll have a go at it: Basically this evil cult makes this baby, Alessa, who has their dark god's soul in it. But it turns out she only has half of the dark god in her. So they burn her, with the intent that her anger is gonna release all that pent up psychic energy. So they try again, and that's where Cheryl comes from (Sharon, in the movie). She has half the soul in her too.
D. Riley: Thanks to a sympathetic nurse (who appears in the film, though only briefly) Cheryl is left on the side of the road and picked up by her adoptive father Harry Mason (Rose in the film). When Harry brings her back to Silent Hill for a vacation, everything goes wrong. Just like in the movie, he sees the child Alessa on the road, crashes his jeep and wakes up to a disappeared Cheryl.
D. Riley: The basic idea of the game (some of this is my interpretation, and the interpretation of others) is the bringing of these two halves of the soul together causes like a psychic tidal wave, and that's where "Misty Silent Hill" and "Nightmare Silent Hill" come from. All the people just disappear (or, conversely, the characters are sucked into another world).
D. Riley: Basically the game is Alessa controlling this "Nightmare Silent Hill" and trying to defend herself from the protagonist, Harry, who is unwittingly the pawn of Alessa's evil mother (and leader of the cult) Dahlia, who's still trying to resurrect the dark god. That's the general idea, minus some of the complexities. There's a character named Dr. Kaufmann in the game that plays a relatively minor role on screen but has a huge impact on the plot.
D. Riley: Removal of some of these elements with the inexplicable addition of others just astonishes me, and that's really what I didn't like about the movie. Like making Dahlia a "good guy" and then having another female character who is exactly the same as Dahlia.

Going About It In All The Wrong Ways

D. Riley: I really just think they bent and broke Silent Hill 1's plot because they weren't convinced they could make a mass-audience palatable version of Silent Hill 2, which really doesn't have a clear "good guy" or a happy ending.
G. Turner: As far as I've read, that almost seems to be the case: they didn't want to adapt Silent Hill 2 because they didn't feel they'd be able to do it justice.
D. Riley: I feel like Silent Hill 2 would be a very easy story to adapt. I figure the problem is, it's not a movie that mainstream audiences would be interested.
G. Turner: I think it'd be quite a bit more accessible, as you don't have the trappings and baggage of 'the cult'. Sure, it's a little more abstract, but it's also much more down to earth.
D. Riley: Like I said, Silent Hill 2 is a lot more forgiving. It requires a LOT less effort on the part of the user to be enjoyed.
G. Turner: It's the cult mythos from Silent Hill that I just can't enjoy; I think the series would be much stronger without it. Based on interpretations of the series, each subsequent entry appears contradicts itself and it really seems to have turned it into a huge mess. In my mind, cults are often no better than the government conspiracy videogame plot devices peddled to us oh so often.
D. Riley: As far as I can recall (it's been a few years since I played 3)... 1 and 3 correlate well enough. 4 is the real stickler. But 4 was a piece of crap all around and I'd be just as happy having that thing vomited right out of canon.
G. Turner: I've always felt that the series was strongest when it was using the town as foils for exploring the psyche of the main characters, and not focusing on the cult (like the practically cult-less Silent Hill 2). Consequently, I liked that the film turned the Silent Hill cult into an over-protective, maternal group of people where all of the characters were connected by that one emotion, that they're all trying to save each other and that they were all going about it in all the wrong ways. It felt much more grounded.
D. Riley: Oh, there's no doubt that Silent Hill 2 is the most emotionally complex of the games. But it's really the exception to the norm in that case.
D. Riley: Silent Hill 1 is really more in the mode of an excellent horror/suspense movie, while Silent Hill 2 dares to "dig deeper", or whatever.
G. Turner: I thought Silent Hill 3 had a nice balance to it. Very character-driven, but not a rehash of the second. Kind of a twisted road movie, I guess.
D. Riley: Hah, that's a good way to describe it. I liked Silent Hill 3 solely for Heather's role as a strong female character that wasn't all T&A.
G. Turner: Definitely. Heather was the best part of the game!
D. Riley: If there was one thing the movie did, it really whet my appetite to play the games again.
G. Turner: Certainly. I'm absolutely itching to run through Silent Hill 3 this time, perhaps brandishing my new unlimited ammo submachine gun!

"Decent Enough"

G. Turner: My one real problem with the film was the final church scene: it was too prototypically splatter.
D. Riley: Yeah, I really detested that. Really from the start of it, with Cybil.
G. Turner: Definitely. What was the purpose of showing her melting face? Yes, martyr, lah-de-dah, we get the point.
D. Riley: That was also one of the most poorly acted/written parts of the film. As I whole I didn't think the film was spectacularly acted, but it was good enough for B-type horror/suspense.
G. Turner: There wasn't a whole lot for them to work with. Sure, the games often orient around vacant characters whose back-story we can only guess at, but Avary could have departed from there a little.
D. Riley: Avary certainly didn't live up to the "messiah of videogame translations" that the media was touting him to be.
G. Turner: I guess they didn't see The Rules of Attraction. That film's enough to sour you on anything he scribes, past, present and future.
D. Riley: Don't get me wrong, I thought it was decent enough, but it all comes back to being "decent enough" ... for a videogame.
G. Turner: Indeed. Especially when, with a game, you have an audience that's more than willing to work for the story, to expend loads of effort to piece it together, even if the pieces need a bit of forcing.
D. Riley: Something like that. I'm a convert. I'm notoriously lazy where stuff like that is concerned. The fact that Silent Hill (the game) could make me do it is a testament to its pull, I think.

The Better Half

G. Turner: There's been a lot of talk about the film being misogynistic, with some saying that you'll be hard pressed to find another film that hates women as much as Silent Hill does. I don't think they've ever seen a Lars von Trier film, but what do you think?
D. Riley: I had actually not heard that.
D. Riley: I think that's gleefully ironic considering all Cristophe Gans's "Women are at the core of this story!" gerrymandering.
G. Turner: Not that this excuses the claims, but the first draft of the film allegedly contained no men.
D. Riley: I'd be hard pressed to call it either way. I think Rose and Cybil are strong enough as female characters. I think, to an extent, he (Gans) is right about it being a very maternal story, that, from both sides, it's about care/control of a child.
G. Turner: Certainly.
D. Riley: Of all the things to complain about in regards to the movie, I really think you're grasping at straws to pick misogynistic. How about poor acting, pacing, or some of the dialogue choices?
G. Turner: Well, there was (as one person put it) the 'barbed-wire rape'.
D. Riley: Oh god.
D. Riley: Well that was just plain excessive on any level. Forget misogyny. I feel like the penultimate scene is best forgotten it every respect. There was no reason for that to be in the movie.
G. Turner: You could potentially justify it as being payback for trying to abort her in the first place, but that might be reaching a bit. Regardless, as you say, that whole scene was unnecessary.
D. Riley: With the Silent Hill brand you're gonna get gore part and parcel, but that's a whole different level of excess.
G. Turner: It's surprising, since there have been a number of graphic scenes in Silent Hill, but they're mostly passive and almost treated as background flourishes.
D. Riley: The crucified/disemboweled body in the first scene stands out as a prime example of that.
G. Turner: Right, exactly. Or some of the caged people in one of the Nightmare scenes. But rarely do the games contain something as actively brutal as the film displayed.
D. Riley: Stuff like that is usually filed into the 'less is more category', like Kaufmann in the first game and Claudia in the third being dragged 'down under'.
G. Turner: Agreed.
D. Riley: I'm actually generally happier with that. My tastes are remarkably puritan in that respect. You say a lot more by not saying it where the 'barbed wire rape' really accomplishes an opposite purpose. It just becomes a trashy, campy scene like the 'tree rape' in Evil Dead.
D. Riley: Just another hokey segment of horror cinema.
G. Turner: Indeed.

"Can Do!" Attitude

G. Turner: Speaking of less-is-more, it would have been much more effective if Alessa's backstory was sprinkled through the film, instead of having one gigantic reveal.
D. Riley: The ten minute expository sequence really killed me. That was one of the final nails in the coffin, especially when you have Sean Bean, who's primed to discover all this stuff about the girl/town, and then does nothing.
G. Turner: Definitely. That entire subplot explained nothing except Cybil's actions. And the cross-cutting between Rose and him as he's searching the town couldn't have been clumsier.
D. Riley: I think that the ten minutes of Bad Alessa talking could've just been distributed across the film. Here and there just drop a hint.
G. Turner: It was a shame, truly and surely. Buried under all the choppy editing and clunky dialogue there really is a good story there, unlike prior gaming adaptations. There's something genuinely worthwhile in there and it's sad that the end result was fumbled like this.
D. Riley: I think more people are going to come away wowed by the visuals and forget that it did have a good story. And even the movie had a good story, somewhere inside it...
D. Riley: If nothing else, Laurie Holden was a little cutie with her short hair, sassy leather pants, and "can do!" attitude!
G. Turner: You're probably right. Call me a glutton for punishment but I wouldn't mind Gans taking a second stab at the series.
D. Riley: I would absolutely watch him take another try. Silent Hill is fifty times better than Brotherhood of the Wolf! At least we have a director who, as far as we know, cares about the series quite vehemently.
G. Turner: And, as Brotherhood of the Wolf and this adaptation showed, he's able to bring just the right amount of fog to everything he directs!

Bad Alessa's Funtime Review

D. Riley: Maybe it's all for publicity or whatever, but reading a director say 'Fuck him' when asked about Robert Ebert's views on videogames as art (or lack thereof), it just makes you feel good.
D. Riley: Ebert's review of the film was positively infuriating. I can't understand how seven or eight people (as he says) went to the movie and couldn't understand the plot.
D. Riley: It wasn't a very complicated movie to begin with, and if you couldn't get it after Bad Alessa's Story Funtime then you're a moron. Take your face out of the popcorn trough Bobby. It's not exactly Shakespeare.
G. Turner: It was his closing quip about the activity of the brain while playing a game that really set me off.
D. Riley: Here's a favorite quite from a review of the film:
D. Riley: "Director Christophe Gans ("Brotherhood of the Wolf") and screenwriter Roger Avary have tried to take a poplar video game and make cinematically interesting out of it. Obviously, game-players are not interested in back stories, character arcs or a plot-driven, three-act structure. Gans and Avary give their dedicated audience what they want and what they do not want. The rest of the country could easily go see THE SENTINEL this weekend. I saw both back-to-back on Thursday night."
D. Riley: No, there's no possible way that people who play videogames could be interested in silly things like back-stories or characters arcs. That's ridiculous.
G. Turner: It's one thing to lament the aptitude of a film's creative crew, but it's an entirely other thing to bash an entire medium.
D. Riley: To say there's nothing of value in an entire medium is just excessive.
G. Turner: History will prove him wrong.

I hope.
D. Riley: "It's a videogame, lol", so it doesn't count.
G. Turner: Indeed. It's amazing how many reviews of the film opened with that as its sticking point and didn't let up, where there's actually very little in the film that overtly sticks to gaming's conventions. Except for the maps.
G. Turner: Regardless, it's horribly hard for me to try and separate the quality of the film from the game. It's easy for us to fill in what we want, since we're familiar with what the film's going for and what it's trying to do.
D. Riley: Maybe my views are a bit tarnished, but I'm honest with myself. Not a great movie, maybe not even a really good movie but, hey, it was passable. Fantastic start until it all falls apart about halfway through.
G. Turner: That sums it up pretty aptly.
D. Riley: A treat for the eyes and the ears, in a lot of ways a fanboy's dream. Everything past that was just gravy, I guess.

Chortles & Hymns

D. Riley: There were plenty of complaints about hokey acting and writing, of course.
G. Turner: There were definite guffaws during my screening at some of the campier moments.
D. Riley: My favorite was "Where did you get this key from?" "Room 111." "Room 111?" "Yes, Room 111." "Then we have to go to Room 111." I embellish a bit, but the intent is there.
G. Turner: Yeah, that was one that set the theater aglow with chuckles.
G. Turner: I just wish that the closing credit scene was toned down a bit, but having the Silent Hill soundtrack play throughout the film was a definite plus. I think they rerecorded some of the tracks though, either that or I need new headphones and home speakers. Could be both.
D. Riley: Yeah, there's was definitely a bit of arrangement going on.
D. Riley: There were some tracks I wish they would've used. I didn't understand the heavy reliance on the later game's soundtracks, but that's just me. Between the theme to the first game and Angela's theme from Silent Hill 2, the bases were pretty well covered. The inclusion of "You're Not Here" over the end was like butter. Total fanboy pandering, sure, but I was into it. More Melissa Williamson can never be wrong with me.
G. Turner: Yeah, I was pretty happy with the tracks they included. Letter From the Lost Days was in there, right? On the radio?
D. Riley: Yeah, in the very beginning. That was pretty seamlessly integrated.
G. Turner: Yes. Almost too seamlessly!
D. Riley: On that tip, the nod of the head to the "radio noise = monsters!!" was pretty nice, without being all hokey and "gamey".
G. Turner: Except for the whole cell phone flickering thing.
D. Riley: Cell phones do that. I seen it.
G. Turner: Who wears their phone around their neck? It reminds me of that PSP press photo where all the models are wearing their PSPs like nooses.
D. Riley: Yeah, I wasn't clear about that either. Maybe it's a soccer mom thing. Also, showing your hand and firing an empty gun at cultists who wanna bash your face in. That's the first thing they teach you.
G. Turner: And the second thing? Laying there and taking it.
D. Riley: I'm not clear on that either. She was thrashing those miners pretty soundly just a few moments before. Cute cop girls need to be smarter! Leather pants and short hair won't take you all the way, sister! Oh, who am I kidding? Yes they will. Call me!
D. Riley: All in all, it was a good first try, and I want to see a second. All I hope is that it gets the box office results to foster that for me, because there's a whole heck of a lot more Melissa Williamson songs I want to hear over credit crawls.
G. Turner: I'll drink to that!