Eric’s Bad Movies: ‘Silent Hill: Revelation’ (2012)

The movie “Silent Hill” has been a thorn in my side ever since it was released — first because it wasn’t good, and then because people kept citing it as the one video-game-based movie that was good. WHICH IT WASN’T. It may have been the least not-good of the bunch, but to call it “good” is a high compliment, by which I mean a compliment you can only make if you’re high.

I am vindicated by the sequel, “Silent Hill: Revelation.” Everyone agrees that this one is terrible, and according to the Internet’s Law of Retroactive Criticism, that means the original is terrible, too, having been ruined by the sequel through an anomaly in the space-time continuum unfamiliar to scientists but known to fanboys as the George Lucas Principle. So I was right all along, and everyone can eat it.

“Silent Hill: Revelation” picks up the story of “Silent Hill” six years later, or five years and eleven months after we forgot every detail of it. The little girl who was missing in that film, Sharon, is now 18 and named Heather (Adelaide Clemens), and she does not remember anything about her past. One of the things she does not remember, for example, is that a cult from the town of Silent Hill is looking for her so they can sacrifice her or impregnate her or whatever, because she’s the Chosen One or the fulfillment of prophecy or something. Heather and her dad, Harry (Sean Bean), have moved around a lot, and Heather thinks it’s because he killed somebody in self-defense and is running from the law, but the real reason is the cult thing. Heather’s mom (Radha Mitchell) is still trapped in another dimension, but Harry can see her in a mirror sometimes, so that’s nice.

Oh! I forgot to tell you: there are other dimensions in these movies. You can tell you’re in the bad dimension because there’s, say, a guy with a triangle for a head who wants to kill you, or a guy with circular saw blades protruding from his skull who wants to kill you. The way that you pass from our dimension to the bad dimension is by the screenplay just deciding to put you there sometimes. That is also how you travel back.

So anyway, Heather keeps popping back and forth between dimensions. One minute her high school hallway looks normal; the next minute it’s a decrepit cavern with faceless monsters lunging at her, and then also in some ways not a normal high school hallway. (No drugs.) Heather thinks she’s going insane, losing the ability to distinguish between dreams and reality. A classmate named Vincent (Kit Harington) tells her that dreams ARE reality, just different realities from the one you’re used to. This is a super-helpful thing to say to someone who’s afraid she’s losing her mind.

Heather is also afraid she’s being followed by a mysterious man, though this fear turns out to be well founded. The man is a private investigator hired by Silent Hill’s most popular cult to find Heather and tell her the truth about her past. The cult is hoping Heather will come back to Silent Hill on her own once she knows everything, but just to sweeten the pot, they abduct her father and write “COME TO SILENT HILL” on the wall in his blood. The persuasive technique is effective.

Heather heads for Silent Hill, accompanied by Vincent, even though Heather just met him at school today and doesn’t like strangers, or even people in general. (The movie went pretty well out of its way to establish this.) As they travel, Heather combs through the Silent Hill-related notebooks her father left behind and learns the whole story, not to mention a great deal about her father’s excellent penmanship.

Here’s where it gets confusing. By “here” I mean “when you decided to watch this movie.” Years ago, the cult in Silent Hill burned a little girl named Alessa who they thought was a witch, but she didn’t die, she just got really angry and created the hell dimension with the monsters. THIS IS WHY YOU SHOULD NOT BURN CHILDREN (or if you do, make sure you finish the job). But before Alessa turned completely into an evil demon, the last innocent part of her soul was transferred to a random newborn infant, who turned out to be Sharon/Heather, and they can’t destroy Alessa until she’s made whole again, which I guess means mushing her and Heather together. And they can’t just abduct Heather and drag her to Silent Hill — she has to go willingly, because the movie said so.

Then it turns out Vincent is a child of the cult who escaped from Silent Hill for the purpose of luring Heather back. But now that he’s met Heather and likes her, he feels bad. Totes sorry. Heather wanders though Silent Hill searching for the other half of a medallion she found in her dad’s stuff, encountering various monsters in the process in a way that is suspiciously similar to a video game. There is no rhyme or reason to when these monsters appear, or what tactics they use to harass Heather, which probably means the answer is “You’d know if you played teh video games!!!1!!” (This is the answer to a lot of questions lately.)

When Heather at last comes face to face with Alessa, she is able to overcome Alessa’s evilness with her own goodness. To be precise, she hugs Alessa very tight, and Alessa disintegrates. Hugging was her kryptonite! Lest you think the movie would end with such an anticlimax, however, Heather then has to face Vincent’s mother, the cult’s priestess, played by Trinity from “The Matrix” in an Edgar Winter wig. The way Heather defeats her is by standing aside and letting the Triangle Head monster destroy her. Heather’s main powers, then, are hugging and getting out of the way. Is that how it is in the video game, too? That doesn’t sound very exciting, but if it isn’t, then I guess the movie is a faithful adaptation.

Categories: Columns

Tags: Adelaide clemens, Eric d. snider, Eric's bad movies, John Snow, Kit harington, Radha Mitchell, Sean bean, Silent Hill, Silent hill: revelation

SILENT HILL (2006)

Tanggal Rilis : 13 October 2006 (Indonesia)
Jenis Film : Adventure | Horror
Diperankan Oleh : Radha Mitchell, Laurie Holden dan Sean Bean

Ringkasan Cerita SILENT HILL (2006) :

DFDer masih ingat dengan Silent Hill nggak? Bagi DFder yang suka bermain game ber-genre survival horror di Playstation, tanpa pernah nonton filmnya pun pasti ingat. Film ini adalah salah satu film yang diangkat dari sebuah game selain film semisal Resident Evil, Fatal Frame, Forbidden Siren, dan masih banyak lainnya.

Cerita dalam film ini diawali dengan rasa putus asa dan kecemasan seorang ibu bernama Rose Da Silva (Radha Mitchell) yang mencari anak perempuannya Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) yang hilang saat tersesat di sebuah kota mati (Silent Hill). Sebenarnya bukan sebuah ketidaksengajaan Rose menuju kota tanpa penghuni ini, namun Rose memang berniat mengikuti mimpi-mimpi yang sering menghantui Sharon dan digambarkannya dalam sebuah lukisan.

Tak peduli dengan protes suaminya, Christopher (Sean Bean), Rose mengajak Sharon menjemput takdir yang membawa mereka ke sebuah tempat yang akan mengubah hidup mereka selamanya. Dalam kekalutannya, Rose mengikuti sebuah siluet yang mirip dengan sosok Sharon. Tanpa sadar Rose berjalan terus mengikuti sosok ‘Sharon’ (belakangan diketahui sebagai Alessa — juga diperankan Jodelle Ferland), yang membawanya ke sebuah gerbang batas yang berlawanan dengan kenyataan.

Rose terbawa masuk ke sebuah kota asing, berkabut, dan dihuni berbagai makhluk berwujud aneh yang tunduk pada kegelapan dengan sebuah kekuatan yang sanggup merubah apapun yang mereka sentuh (salah satunya menampilkan karakter monster ‘Patients’ dan ‘Lying Figures’ dari game Silent Hill 2). Dalam usahanya mencari Sharon, Rose dibantu Cybil (Laurie Holden), polisi lokal yang secara tak sengaja ikut terjebak di Silent Hill.

Saat menyusuri kegelapan kota dan mulai mengenali apapun yang dijumpainya, Rose penasaran dan tergerak menyelidiki latar belakang Silent Hill. Dia mulai menyadari bahwa dirinya dan Sharon hanya sebuah bagian dari permainan misteri yang memaksanya mempertaruhkan nyawa dan membuat perjanjian dengan iblis berwujud gadis kecil (Alessa). Demi menyelamatkan Sharon, Rose harus terus berjuang atau berakhir bersama kegelapan.

Re-Views: Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001)

By the time Kevin Smith made Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, in 2001, he’d already secured a place in the pantheon of Cool Gen-X Filmmaker Geeks with his four previous efforts: Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, and Dogma. They were all set in the same universe, with characters from one film popping up in the others, an ingenious gimmick that gave Smith’s fans the feeling that they were all insiders. It helped that each movie featured an appearance by the cuddly, ursine Smith himself, in the guise of Silent Bob, affable partner to the motormouthed vulgarian pothead known as Jay (Jason Mewes).

I came late to the party. I discovered (and loved) Clerks just before Dogma came out, and while I never saw Chasing Amy or Mallrats, what I experienced of Smith’s work appealed to me. The films struck me as funny, irreverent, and intelligent summations of Smith’s generation. Since I was part of that generation (he’s four years older than me), and since I was in my mid-20s when I found him, his obsession with pop culture was right up my alley.

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was the culmination of Smith-ism, piling all of his characters and fixations into a movie that also happened to have a good-sized budget and would be chock-full of celebrity cameos. It was a movie just for Smith’s loyal admirers, like something a fan club would send out to its charter members. And I ate it up.

What I said then: “A parody of modern filmmaking that is itself a compelling example of it — a movie that has room to dish out criticism, because it can withstand the same when it’s flung back…. The film is one giddy set piece after another, full of cameos from celebrities who clearly just love Kevin Smith movies and wanted to be in one…. The jokes are surprisingly on-target and fresh, with few misfires…. The film is self-indulgent [but] the reason the self-indulgence is OK is that we like Kevin Smith. He’s the cool, popular kid in school who doesn’t fit with any of the cliques but is accepted by all of them. I hope he hangs around with us for a long time.” Grade: A- [complete review]

Even at the time, my review was more effusive than most. The film had a 53 percent positive rating at Rotten Tomatoes, with an average score of 5.7 out of 10 — suggesting that even among those who praised the movie, not many looooved it. I wish I could find my notebook from back then so I could see what I jotted down during the screening.

This would turn out to be Kevin Smith’s high point in some ways. It was his widest release to date, and even now is second only to Cop Out. Its U.S. box-office gross of $30.8 million was barely behind Dogma for first place, and has since been surpassed only by Zack and Miri Make a Porno (barely) and Cop Out. He didn’t make another film for three years, and it was the much-derided Jersey Girl. He followed that with Clerks II and Zack and Miri, both obvious and not particularly successful attempts to recapture his former profane glory. And then there was Cop Out, whose critical drubbing led Smith to rant on Twitter about how the critics were biased against him. (He was partially correct. Critics are biased against bad movies, and he made a bad movie.)

The Re-viewing

Having been moderately to significantly disappointed by all of Smith’s subsequent films, I was eager to re-watch one from the glory days. Some classic Smith! That’s what the doctor ordered.

Well, the doctor’s order has gone unfilled. I re-watched Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and was astonished — dumbfounded — at how awful it was. I barely cracked a smile. Mostly I sat there in stoned-faced disbelief. What an insufferably unfunny mess! How could 2001 Eric and 2011 Eric have such wildly divergent views on the same movie?

The major problem, I think, is that JASBSB was very “of the moment,” and that moment has passed. The jokes about Miramax and its stalwarts (like Gus Van Sant and Wes Craven) are all hopelessly out-of-date now. So are the Affleck and Damon bits and the cameos by James Van Der Beek and Jason Biggs. It’s like watching an SNL “Weekend Update” segment from a decade ago. You understand what the jokes mean — and they were probably funny at the time — but they don’t have any resonance anymore.

My 2001 review said this: “A parody of modern filmmaking that is itself a compelling example of it — a movie that has room to dish out criticism, because it can withstand the same when it’s flung back.” I laughed when I re-read that, because on the second viewing, I’d had exactly the opposite opinion.

Someone in the movie, objecting to the development of a film about Jay and Silent Bob, says that they’re “one-note jokes that only stoners laugh at.” There are many such meta-jokes sprinkled throughout the film, Smith’s way of responding to people who were skeptical about the idea of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Ideally, those skeptics are watching JASBSB and thinking, “Wow, this is actually pretty good. We stand corrected. Well played, Smith!”

But here’s what I was thinking: “Yeah, Kev, they ARE one-note jokes. Yeah, actually, there ISN’T enough material here for an entire movie. As a matter of fact, you should NOT have been nearly as confident about this as you were.”

I also kept thinking: “Why is every character in this movie — not just Jay and Silent Bob but EVERYONE — so obsessed with gay sex?” The entire run of Queer as Folk had fewer references to gay sex than this movie does. It isn’t that the jokes are offensive, but that they’re so numerous, suggesting that Smith has a very, very short list of things he thinks are funny and has to keep coming back to the same ones.

I counted four separate instances of characters making a wink-wink meta-joke and then turning to look directly at the camera — you know, in case we didn’t understand that “a Jay and Silent Bob movie? Feature length? Who’d pay to see that?” was a reference to THIS movie! The one we’re watching!! One of those bits might work. But four? Yeesh. It’s like the movie is so pleased with being self-referential that it can’t stop telling us how self-referential it is.

The humor is generally blunt and obvious in that way. For example, Mark Hamill shows up and has a light-saber fight with Jay and Silent Bob. It ends with his hand being sliced off — a joke that every single member of the audience gets immediately, because that’s what happened to Luke Skywalker. WE GET IT. Yet Smith underscores the joke by having Hamill say, “Not again!” Ugh.

Damon and Affleck’s goofy self-parody made me chuckle a little, as did Chris Rock’s turn as an angry director. My beloved Will Ferrell, for whom I have a confessed weakness, elicited what, two or three small laughs? How is that even possible??

Do I still love this movie?

Wow, no. The Hollywood parodies are dated and clunky, the central characters tiresome, the vulgarity mostly un-clever. The self-indulgence that I enjoyed 10 years ago because Smith was in his prime now just seems desperate and smug. I suspect that one’s satisfaction with Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is dependent on one’s current level of fondness for Kevin Smith in general. Lapsed devotees like myself won’t find anything to re-convert them.

Grade: D