New Silent Hill Trailer

[Jurassosaurus]

It's not news, and it's not a direct link, so I don't think this would fall under the images category. As such, I'm placing it in the open topic directory.

The new trailer for the Silent Hill movie seems to suggest an interesting melding of the first 3 games. Judging from still shots, I wasn't that impressed. In fact, I was very leary (especially when I saw This shot of Pyramid Head [Yes that's a person in a costume]). After viewing the trailer though, I retain my hopes that this could be a very good adaptation of the series, and has the possibility of being the first successful videogame movie.

Just one month to go before final judgement.

Newest Silent Hill Trailer

[Gremlin]

So, http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/silenthill is every bit as weird as the game was.

Based on the trailer and the synopsis, I'm already wishing that they hadn't strayed so far from the first game; having more of a backstory before the weirdness might actually explain a few things.

As it is, I've played four of these things now, and I still have no idea what's going on in any of them. Though, by the same token, I've played at least eight Resident Evil games, seen two films, and even gone through the various incarnations of Wesker's Report, and I'm still trying to figure out most of that storyline, too.

Games may have made more sense when all you had to know was that, for some reason, your sixpixel stardestroyer had wound up in the middle of a field of revenant asteroids.

[Hunter]

...West Virginia?

Silent Hill is in West Virginia?

The trailer looks okay, but it has the benefit of being short and rapid-fire. And I hope that Pyramid Head, if he's really going to be in the movie, has significantly more blood on him -- or SOMETHING. Maybe less lighting. Something's not right there. Something's very not right.

Maybe I'm just too picky. I should know better, right? It's a videogame movie -- just about everything is against it, especially since it's such a fucked up videogame.

[Hunter]

I got a big version of the trailer, and went through it slowly [my only choice, really, because it was big enough that my computer choked on it].

I got some screenshots -- of the monsters, of course. They're here.

[Morphia]

Granted, I am an overly-sensitive Silent Hill loyalist, but I am more irked by the fact that they cant decide which game they are turning into a movie. 1? 2? 3? Hell, they're confused, so 4 may as well be in there too.... The plot comes from one, the plot devices come from 2, the characters and monsters are from all over the damned place...

Its like watching the Jurassic Park flicks all over again: We don't like the source material enough to make a movie of it directly, ooh, but this scene is good, this ones good, and this one... well, we'll pay for it, but good luck seeing it on film. If I wanted these reinterpretations, I would never bother with the source material and just read the fucking fan-fic and novelizations.

That aside, I'm liking the visuals... at elast thats something they seem to have gotten right.

Now the last question remains, out of all the video game movies they've made and completely fucked up, why am I still holding out hope that this one will be different?
_________________
We're so right wing , we're so left wing
We're so damned, and we're so dead
But were all so fucking pretty on the outside

http://www.deophagy.com

[Jurassosaurus]

It's funny, my biggest complaint about the movie was that it seems to be following too close to the original games. Considering that each game was a completely different story, I always thought it would make the most sense to have a completely original story for the movie too.

Considering the way they are blending all the first three games, it still might be possible that this story could wind up being more original than it initially seems. Not that I'm holding my breath.

As for the monsters, I think my favourite is that moving face beast. I didn't even catch that until Hunter posted the screenshots. That thing looks disturbingly neat. The rest of the monsters look really good too, though I wish SH2's monster design wasn't used as the baseline. For a fan it makes things confusing since the SH2 monster scheme was based on the psyche of James Sunderland. I mean, what the hell is the point of Pyramid Head in this movie, besides the creep factor? If they were going to take creatures from the game, then it would be nice to see pendulum, or Valtiel (er, except that Valtiel is Pyramid Head in SH2. So I guess he's in it...ahh too fucking confusing!).

Quote:

Hunter wrote: ..West Virginia? Silent Hill is in West Virginia?

Yeah, I was doing a WTF doubletake on that too. Silent Hill has been speculated to have existed in a variety of spots, but I think this is the first time West Virginia has been selected.

The official canon suggests that Silent Hill doesn't actually exist in one spot at all. It's sort of like a phantom town (fitting considering the subject matter).

Actually IGN's Jessica Chobot recently interviewed Akira Yamaoka, the producer/composer of the series.

From an excerpt of the Insider Interview:

Quote:

Insider: Each game hints at a different location in which SH is located (Michigan, New England, California, etc..), where is the "official" location of Silent Hill? Akira Yamaoka: There is no exact location for Silent Hill. We visited several parts of America to do research for the development so I would say that Silent Hill would be a mixture of towns in America :-)

Yes, the emoticon is Yamaoka's.

Quote:

Gremlin wrote: As it is, I've played four of these things now, and I still have no idea what's going on in any of them. Though, by the same token, I've played at least eight Resident Evil games, seen two films, and even gone through the various incarnations of Wesker's Report, and I'm still trying to figure out most of that storyline, too.

The basic premise seems to be that the town has the power to draw lost, distraught and often evil people to it. After that, it acts like a fucked up version of a therapy session. The monsters are always twisted incarnations of the main character's experiences and/or desires. As to whether or not the monsters are real, or halucinations (brought about by the White Claudia flower), that remains ambiguous.

In Japan Konami released: Lost Memories:The Art and Music of Silent Hill. It's equivalent to Capcom's: The Wesker Report. Though it never made it out here (might have hit Europe), someone went to the trouble of translating it and placing it on a website for all to view.

http://silenthillchronicle.net/contents.htm

One can click on the different games to get a good synopsis of the entire series, and what everything means (well, approximately means). This is probably as close to an expository prologue as the series is ever going to get.

Quote:

Morphia wrote: Now the last question remains, out of all the video game movies they've made and completely fucked up, why am I still holding out hope that this one will be different?

I actually think the first sentence in your post kind of answered this question. As fans we always seem to keep the blinders on and hope for the best. After all, weren't we all doing that when the Resident Evil movie was announced?

Course to be fair, Resident Evil was an okay movie. It was Apocalypse that crapped on the series (did we really need super Anne and the incredible Nemesis puppet?).

[Gremlin]

I always thought of SilentHill as a sort of suburb of Portland, Oregon, for some reason. It just looks like it. I could almost buy northern Georgia, but the accents were all wrong for that.

And yeah: Resident Evil was a decent film--especially for its time; to date, it had been about the only zombiefilm with anything resembling a budget, regardless how little it had to do with the games. It's just hard to remember that after both its sequel erased the original's coolness, and Remake of the Dead kinda slaughtered it a couple years later.

I'm still not sure whether SilentHill in any way qualifies as a zombiegame. I'll read through the translated report and see if there's any way of finding that out....

[Hunter]

The newest Fangoria [#252?] has an article about Silent Hill in it.

I could probably retype the whole thing, but I don't really feel like it right now. And I couldn't find it on their site...so, I'll just copy in the paragraphs I thought were interesting.

Quote:

While many fans have expressed outrage that the game's protagonist has undergone a sex change for the film, Gans says it was necessary in order to make the story arc work. "When we started putting the story of the first game on paper, all the dialogue and situations with Harry made us realize he's not written as a guy, but as a woman," Gans says. "He doesn't act like a guy in the game. It's not so obvious when you play it, because you enjoy that he's very sensible and sensitive, but when yo put thaton paper, it doesn't work. I didn't want to betray the character or fans of Silent Hill, but in order to keep the same quality, I had to transform the protagonist into a female." Surprisingly, the Konami team didn't resist this alteration, and in fact are planning to modify the original game with a female lead when they rerelease it in the near future.

So, I guess we can expect a new version of the old game. That ought to be funny.

Quote:

While the look and feel of the movie were certainly important, recreating the game's various creatures was also a key factor for Gans, who brought Patrick (Underworld) Tatopoulos abord to design them. While it would have been easy to go the CGI route, Gans was adamant that the monsters be shot practically (with the exception of the Bugs, the only digital creations in the entire film). "All the monsters were on set," Gans says with pride. "That was a big thing. There are no CG creatures; they were all shot on set. Of course, we changed some of their actions in post, but it was more about filming them in reverse so they had strange movements and stuff like that. We used a choreographer to create the monsters' movements, and every one is played by a dancer. That's an interesting thing you will see--each creature has a different type of behavior." The featured fiends derived from the games include Silent Hill 2's Red Pyramid Head, the Dark Nurses, the Armless Thing (sometimes called the Demon Patient), the Grey Children (a.k.a. the Mumblers) and of course the Boss. Gans also came up with a new beast to add to the existing world. "His name is the Janitor," he says.

No Bigmouth. Probably because it'd be kinda hard to do that thing 'practically', or whatever the term is.

The whole thing is, like, five pages of three columns each. I could probably copy it over, but I'm not quite up to it right now. If anyone wants to see the whole thing, though, I'll go ahead and do it.

I do recommend that you actually purchase or subscribe to Fangoria, though. $9. [$12 Canadian] is kinda steep for a magazine, but it's a magazine I thought was worth subscribing to....

EDIT: I went ahead and typed up the article anyway. I posted it over on my site, here

[Jurassosaurus]

IGN Filmforce has a 2 part interview on a visit to the Silent Hill set. The first part is so so. Not all that informative though they do give an "eyes-on" rundown of the "dark nurse" scene (last I checked they were supposed to be called bubble head nurses. To be fair though, dark nurse sounds better).

The second part is far more interesting. They interview Christophe Gans, and he reveils how much of an SH fan he really is.

I'm not sure how much of this might be a repeat of what was written in Fangoria, so I apologize ahead of time if this turns out to be old news.

Also I'll warn everyone ahead of time that Christophe is decidedly foreign. As such the transcript of what he said winds up jumping all over the place. It can make it a little hard to follow.

Overall though, I'm feeling pretty confident about the movie.


Some excerpts:

Quote:

"I played the first one five years ago," says Gans. "So we spent five years talking about this film. What [took] so long was to reach the people at Konami [and convince them] that we'd make something very true to the game. The team of Silent Hill is a team of three or four guys and they are very, very conscious of what they've achieved and they didn't want anybody to screw up their work…" ... Gans says the film draws influence from all three Silent Hill games. "I'm going to be very precise. It is a [combination] of Silent Hill 1 with some elements from the third one, which is a straight sequel to the first one, and with the look of the second one, which is my favorite. But I think that, it's not like trying to put three games in one film. We did not try to do that. We really tried to adapt the first one, but there were so many great elements in the second and third one, that we didn't resist… Also, because, if for example, you read the strategy guide of the third one, you see that it actually is trying to explain what happened in the first one. And that's a very interesting process, because the first game looked like a very spontaneous creation. But after, we tried to make something with it, tried to create a mythology, and that's what we are trying to do with the film - be absolutely true to that mythology…" ... For the dark look of the film, Gans admits to drawing on directors such as David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Michael Mann and others as well as the game itself. "I was seeing Collateral, the movie by Michael Mann, and I found that there were some amazing moments… [We wanted to] transcribe the darkness on screen and how to achieve the same feeling that we have in the game, where actually a character can be lit by just a Zippo [lighter], nothing else around. So we [did] some tests and we found that it was very interesting to work in night vision because we have a very, very clean element and then after we can work and crash into the darkness as much as we can just to give the feeling that we are exactly in the game…" ... "For the moment, I can tell you, one part of the film is shot with a crane - simply to produce the isometric point of view… And, I also did that in Brotherhood of the Wolf in some sequences. Here it's extensive… You are going to see a crane movement flying over everything. It was kind of fun to work like that... We even built sets which actually are movable, just to have amazing crane movements which reproduce exactly some of the crane movement that you saw in the game. We went very far on that…" ... As a great game, Silent Hill has a story inside it. Of course that story is much of the time in the background of the game because you have to play, but if you are careful and if you play again and again through the first one… The second one, especially the third one… Suddenly you realize that there is a huge story behind the game and that's what we try to enstore into the film." ... The feel Gans is going for is more of a thriller than an outright gore fest. Although there will be some blood, it will not be a blood-fest per se. "I think that Silent Hill is not something gory. It's more disturbing… It's constantly disturbing… We tried to keep that disturbing quality…" ... "In the film, there is 108 locations or set pieces… So basically, it is a movie of 110 minutes I think… Basically, you will have a [around] one set per minute simply because, normally, a horror film is confined to a room or a house, but we have never seen a horror film with a complete town like that. So it was a new challenge in terms of production design especially… [The look is] very close [to the game]. My word on the film was follow the game… We follow very closely… I'm a gamer and I'm a very, very strong fan and I really want to see the game on screen. I would be so sad if it was not the game…" If Brotherhood of the Wolf is any indication, Silent Hill should provide a visual assault on the senses. Gans says that his favorite scene involves a view into Heaven. "In the film, I have to transcribe Hell and Purgatory. The darkness is Hell and of course the foggy dimension is Purgatory. At one moment, I have to shoot something which looked like Heaven. I think it's my favorite sequence in the film…"

[Morphia]

Read an article in Fangoria tonight about the flick. For once my jaded pessimism may be misplaced. They certainly have the look down for the most part: There was one image which seemed ripped from Sh1, where the corpse is strapped to the fence right before Harry blacks out, which in the magazine, seemed to have taken a candy-raver turn... but otherwise, it seems right about where it should be.

Still keeping my fingers crossed.
_________________
We're so right wing , we're so left wing
We're so damned, and we're so dead
But were all so fucking pretty on the outside

http://www.deophagy.com

[Hunter]

That'd probably be the article I retyped. So, y'know, people who didn't have the magazine could read it. Sounds like it. I remember the picture, anyway.

That whole thing about the mother and the womb is just really weird....

[Morphia]

It was the same article, I just didn't make the connection. That aside, I was more interested in the visuals.
_________________
We're so right wing , we're so left wing
We're so damned, and we're so dead
But were all so fucking pretty on the outside

http://www.deophagy.com

[Jurassosaurus]

The TV spots are running now. One is the full trailer while another one is a shortened version with extra footage. The short one seemed promising up until the part where the demonized little girl said: "I am the reaper."

Maybe in the context of the movie that will sound better, but in the TV spot it just seemed stupid.

I'm still hopeful, but I expect the movie to contain a few groaners.