REVIEW: Silent Hill Revelation

Unlike most people who love Silent Hill, I didn't first play the games and then watch the films. I started out with the first film, then got hooked and finally played Silent Hill 3. At first I was awfully excited about the coming out of a new Silent Hill film (with Kit Harington, whom I think is a great actor) but as soon as the negative reviews started to appear online, I decided to wait until it came out on dvd. It has not exactly been released yet, but since Joshua had some free credit to order a film on digital tv, we ended up watching it anyway.

Source: Google images

Despite of the critics' negative reviews, this film deserves some praise as well. The fact that it was largely based on the Silent Hill 3 game was a pleasant surprise, since it was the only one I had played. The actress playing Sharon/Heather (Adelaide Clemens) was excellent, both in looks and acting work; she strongly resembled the video game character and responded in more or less the same way to most of the experiences. Vincent's (Kit Harington) part in the plot got changed a lot as compared to the games but it worked for the narration, although his story got slightly predictable at times. 
The horror imagery was brilliant and did look a lot like that of the games. The most thrilling scenes were definitely the ones with the nurses and Pyramid Head, they looked fantastic and the way the acted and moved would make your hair stand up on end. Some scenes were hard to make sense out of but the visual horror never failed to fix possible illogical progressions (I have yet to find some sense in the power and use of the seal of Metatron).
"Now why did the critics not like this film?" I wondered for seventy minutes. Well, if they are anything like me, they must have been disappointed by the ending. Anyone who's seen the first film or played any of the games would expect a plot twist and yes, it was there, but it was the simplest, dullest and laziest plot twist that could possibly have been made.

Even though the ending was enormously disappointing, the film really wasn't that bad. I loved everything about it up until the confrontation with Claudia and everything after. That's still a decent seventy minutes of good horror. Just don't expect a mind-blowing ending.



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