Review of Silent Hill: Revelation 3D (2012) by Ibash — 02 Dec 2012

Well ... it was fun to watch - if for the wrong reasons. Aweful and ridiculous plot and dialogue by blant and meaningless characters who behave and act stupidly will have you grin and giggle throughout a movie that tries to be exaggeratingly heavy on exposition and explaning but still manages to make no sense at all. It contradicts itself all the time and when it doesn't, it presents situations that are very unlikely and unbelievable if thought through.

To say something good, the movie looks and sounds great, there's no denying it and even the 3D looks good. (Though the latter will depend on the theatre you visit, too.) I also thought the actors did a good job, the horrible script isn't their fault.

So how about comparing the movie to the game it's based on? The similarities mostly start and end with the namedropping. In general, there's no need to slavishly stick to the game's plot ect., but if you change stuff, it should benefit the movie.

Revelation has the following problem: it wants to be a sequel to the first movie and yet tell the plot of the third game which is problematic because the first movie already altered the key plot aspects of the first game significantly and especially those that are relevant for how the story was continued in the third game. (The second game had a completely independent story.).

Now it would've been no problem to just stick with what the first movie did and build on it, but instead, the narration tries to combine the two differing stories - BUT does so very poorly, because first of all, in doing so, it does contradict certain facts known from the first movie and second of all, it still changes the story of the third game anyways! What the ---- was it good for to completely break the continuity and the canon of the first movie just to include the third game's plot when you, then, alter that plot anyways? You could've just altered the game's plot to fit the first movie and fine!

If you like the games, the saddest thing about this movie is that it simply doesn't feel like a Silent Hill. It is not scary at all, there is absolutely neither mystery nor confusion, the emotional aspects are shallow and uninteresting and the town of Silent Hill is overcrowded with people.

Which is in itself, independently from the games, ridiculous because on the one hand, the town is so super dangerous ect., but on the other hand, a full community has been living and surviving there for over a century among the hostile monsters and a spoiled brat gone wild with destructive super powers. For instance, the asylum in the movie is crawling with monsters that kill everyone they can get a hold of and yet, the order, trapped in the very same nightmare world, is using the place as a psychological hospital. (Basically, they brainwash people in there or make them prisoners when they disobey.) In one scene, they bring one of the characters there for "treatment", bring him into a room full of monster nurses, try to do their job among them, and then, surprisingly, get killed by those even though they knew the nurses were in that room and that they were dangerous. Fleeing whenever "the darkness" - yikes - approaches is the number one rule, but all of a sudden, the "darkness" is the perfect working place. Oooops, dead.

That's how much sense the movie makes.

Overall, yes, you can have a good laugh at the movie and it's remarkably well done, but that's about it. If you are a fan of the series and have a lot of humour, you will enjoy the movie for how funny it is and for all the little innuendos and references to the game series, but will also feel like you want to cry because the movie butchers and, pretty much, insults he franchise.

If you don't know the games, this movie will make even less sense to you and you won't even be able to enjoy the shameless fan-service, so ... better go see something else.