Return to Silent Hill

Hooooo boy. Okay, so here's the thing. I respect a big swing. I do. Even when it's a miss, I can respect someone going hard for a weird idea. Sometimes, though, that miss is so sensationally, profoundly, catastrophically bad that you go all the way back around to no longer respecting it.

That's the case with Return to Silent Hill for me.

So, here's a quick rundown of my history with Silent Hill, just for context. I watched a movie called Jacob's Ladder when it came out in 1990. I was 12 and just old enough to sort of understand what I was watching. It's not very accessible in terms of what's actually going on, at least for a 12-year-old, but I got the gist of it. What I really dug was the way the horror was presented. That imprinted on my mind. It's a very subtle, psychological approach to horror that works like gangbusters for me. Body horror, psychosexual symbolism, and so much traaaaauma.

It apparently also worked on Keiichiro Toyama, the man behind Silent Hill. Silent Hill was a Japanese series of games, influenced heavily by an American movie, about American characters, intended for a Western audience, and it was fantastic... for what it was. Which was a Japanese interpretation of Western psychological horror. When you know that's what it is, it becomes much easier to forgive the stilted, sometimes confusing dialogue and character choices.

Japanese storytelling and dialogue have very different rhythms and storytelling mechanics than Western storytelling and dialogue. Anyone who has played video games in the last twenty-five years is used to this. It comes with the territory when you're playing games translated from countries where English isn't their first language. Just like with movies and books and anything that's translated, you understand that you're not getting the story as it was originally told, and that you lose a bit in the process. That's just the nature of it.

Now, Silent Hill was always released in English, but it was written in Japanese, and the scripts were translated. So Western actors were performing a Japanese script, translated into English, and it showed. That's just true. It took some squinting at times to allow for those beats that were lost in translation. It's okay, it happens.

So when Christopher Gans (a French filmmaker, just to add another layer of language confusion) came along and made the first Silent Hill movie, I went and saw it in the theater, as I was a pretty big fan of the games. I really wanted to like it. I did not, on my theatrical viewing. I wanted something very different from what it was.

I came to appreciate it later, after another couple of viewings, because it was a big swing. It was far from perfect, and there's a lot I wish were better, but there's a lot I really enjoyed about it. They managed to capture much of what made the games atmospheric, at least, if not particularly scary. That was the problem I had with it: It wasn't particularly scary. It was like a haunted house ride version of Silent Hill, where you're just kind of observing it rather than engaging with it.

Maybe that's because I came from playing those games where you have to sit with the characters for hours and hours, watching their stories unfold. In a movie (or at least this movie), they had to come up with a tighter, more traditional story than the rambling, piecemeal way games (and most story-driven games) present their stories. By doing that, you put yourself in the headspace of watching a movie, and your expectations suddenly change. You want movie logic and movie pacing and movie acting and movie storytelling. This just wasn't that. At least, not enough of it.

When you're playing a Japanese game, even when it's influenced by, and about, Western characters and settings, you make allowances for the stilted, weird way the voice actors perform their dialogue. They're doing their best (I assume, shit, I don't know), but it's always going to be a little weird.

That's a little harder to forgive in a couple of hours of a movie. Christopher Gans, on the other hand, took his job seriously, but in a way that made me wonder whether he knew exactly what his job was. Because he translated so much of the games that didn't need to be translated to a movie. Things like the simplistic, goofy dialogue and the meandering, confusing story that never really amounts to much. As I said, there's a lot to like about the movie, but I wouldn't call it a GOOD movie.

So that movie came and went. Then there was the one with Jon Snow, which we don't talk about.

And now, twenty years after the first Silent Hill movie, twenty-six years after the first Silent Hill video game, and thirty-six years after I watched Jacob's Ladder at twelve years old, Return to Silent Hill has hit the theaters to a resounding BOOO from the critics on Rotten Tomatoes.

I went to see it this afternoon. I knew what I was getting into. I remembered the first movie and how disappointed I was the first time I watched it. But holy shit, I wasn't prepared for what Christopher Gans had in store for me this time around.

You see, all of the things I mentioned about how he didn't seem to understand which elements of the game (the story, the ideas, the character design and aesthetic) to adapt, and which to leave out (the goofy dialogue, overly complicated trauma story, and weird character choices), well, he seemed to have learned all the wrong lessons from the first movie.

What we got was the most convoluted, confusing movies I've ever seen. It was like watching Jacob's Ladder if Tommy Wiseau had a bigger budget and was told to make his own Silent Hill movie. It was really that kind of movie.

I do believe it will reward rewatches, but probably not for the reasons the people behind the movie want. It's hilariously bad. None of the good qualities of the first movie made it into this one. Every single choice was sloppy and missed the mark completely. They improved on nothing from the first movie.

They took the story from the game Silent Hill 2 and translated it almost verbatim, shot-for-shot, in many parts of the movie. That's never a good idea. Trying to replicate the experience of playing a game is a fool's errand. If I wanted that, I'd just play the much better-crafted game. I don't go to the movies to feel like I'm playing a video game. Especially not a 25-year-old game.

If it were JUST that, I might have rated it a little higher. If it were just a really poorly conceived translation of Silent Hill 2, it would be disappointing, but I'd still respect the swing.

This thing though...

Okay, I don't think I can imagine how someone possibly could misunderstand a story as profoundly and fundamentally as this movie seems to misunderstand Silent Hill 2. What it's about and what the point of it was. I don't care that he added a bunch of goofy characters and storylines to fill in the story. That doesn't bother me. Hell, I want that. Just please do a good job of it.

Silent Hill 2 is a deep exploration of grief, guilt, and trauma through the lens of horror. It's psychologically complex and nuanced. Return to Silent Hill is neither complex nor nuanced. It's clumsy, lazy, and completely fails to capture any of what made the game so good.

Rather than take that story and make a movie out of it, he gave us a movie, intentionally designed to look like a video game cut scene. He gave us actors who intentionally performed in that awkward, translated video-game style. He used the same tired Silent Hill songs from the soundtrack by longtime Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka. Don't get me wrong, it's good music for a video game, but it was used in this film as a cheat to make us think they knew what they were doing.

It's like he intentionally did everything wrong. Every choice was baffling because none of them made it a good movie.

Anyway, that's enough rambling about Silent Hill. I just have thoughts, okay?!