And then there’s the plot, which is about as murky and headache-inducing as the 3D visuals. Centred on the now-teenaged girl who went missing in the first film and who now returns to Silent Hill to save her kidnapped father and battle a demon toddler, it’s a deceptively simple story rendered needlessly, frustratingly nonsensical by a script devoid of a basic understanding of coherent storytelling. This is in spite of the fact that characters’ conversations are entirely functional, serving only to fuzzily explain what the devil is going on, to no avail. Returning viewers buying tickets for more “Silent Hill” lunacy will be left scratching their heads again; “Silent Hill" newcomers will end up a little too comatose to care — perhaps they can dream up a better, altogether more comprehensible storyline while this one clumsily unfolds before their tightly shut eyes.
At the brain-boggling conclusion of the first “Silent Hill,” heroine Rose Da Silva and rescued daughter Sharon arrived back home to discover they weren’t home at all; in fact, they were still trapped inside the fog-smothered underworld of Silent Hill. In “Revelation," Rose is able to send Sharon back to the real world thanks to a magic amulet and, through a magic mirror, tells husband Christopher (Sean Bean, “Game of Thrones”) to keep their daughter safe. Meanwhile, the undead (I think) cultists of Silent Hill plot to lure Sharon back to their haunted hometown so that she may kill the evil, all-powerful little girl who reigns over them.
About to turn 18, Sharon has now assumed the name Heather (Australian actress Adelaide Clemens) while her dad names himself Harry. Although she has no memory of her time in Silent Hill, Heather suffers from nightmares set in the town’s fairground, where she rides a merry-go-round encircled by a ring of flames. During the day, she is plagued with disturbing hallucinations of monsters chasing after her. A private detective (whose trench coat couldn’t be less subtle) follows her around, apparently hired by a cult. Upon returning home one night, she discovers her father is missing, and written in blood on the living room wall is that aforementioned invitation: “Come to Silent Hill.”
So, she does, and the place appears to be no different from before. By day, black ash falls from the sky like snow while the air is thickened by a ghostly grey mist; by night, the town is shrouded in darkness, from which monstrous, mutant freaks emerge to frighten and feast. Missing, however, is the consistently eerie atmosphere Gans achieved in the otherwise dreary first film, present here only in fits and starts. What we’re left with, then, is mostly dreariness, although die-hard gamers are sure to cheer (perhaps out of relief) when the iconic Pyramid Head turns up, wielding an impossibly colossal blade and sporting a gigantic cheese grater atop his shoulders.
Other monsters include a spider-like creature seemingly constructed out of mannequin parts, and the knife-wielding, faceless nurses who contort and stab at the sound of nearby movement. There’s also a strangely sinister bunny rabbit doll with large, staring eyes, which would fit right into a David Lynch film, but not here. In the “Silent Hill” games, I am told, the monsters are a manifestation of the main characters’ fears and innermost thoughts. In “Revelation,” they serve no discernable purpose other than setting up supposedly suspenseful situations in which Heather and stale love interest Vincent (Kit Harrington, “Game of Thrones") run down darkly lit corridors, their hearts pounding while ours stay all too steady.
The best thing in “Revelation" is a nigh-unrecognisable Carrie-Anne Moss (aka Trinity in “The Matrix") as villainess Claudia, the tyrannical leader of the Silent Hill cult. Moss has a menace and a madness to her performance, but she is wasted, given a measly two scenes and inexplicably transformed into a leather-clad monster during the overblown, muddled climax (in which an important character is killed through means which escape me). Wasted too is a reliably hammy Malcolm MacDowell (“A Clockwork Orange”), who plays a blind man chained up in a mental asylum whose job it is to deliver plot info I couldn’t even begin to understand. It’s not that I didn’t pay attention; it’s that by this point I didn’t care, and neither, I strongly suspect, did the filmmakers.
I will end this review on a note I made in my review of Paul W. S. Anderson’s “Resident Evil: Retribution," which I stated successfully recreated the experience not of playing a “Resident Evil" video game but of watching someone else play a “Resident Evil" video game. I have yet to encounter a film based on a video game that successfully recreates the gaming experience, which is often engaging, involving, enthralling, intense and exciting. “Silent Hill: Revelation” is not that film: we watch in boredom, waiting for someone to hand us the controls.
3/10
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