With a 19 percent reviewer score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 29 percent audience score, Return to Silent Hill proves to be a disastrous adaptation. Fans left the theater angry, while critics left disappointed. One audience reviewer noted that it “literally butchered every aspect of the game.”
The movie is a psychological horror film loosely based on the 2001 video game Silent Hill 2.
The key word here is “loosely.” Return to Silent Hill changes so much about the story and its characters that some of them feel pointless and others don’t even feel like their game counterparts at all.
WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD.
The biggest fans of the game will be outraged at how the story is changed. While video game adaptations have been hit-or-miss in the past decade, Return to Silent Hill outright betrays the fanbase of the game. This movie has major character changes, plot lines that weren’t in the original Silent Hill 2 and characters that felt underutilized.
Character changes
In the game, the character of James Sunderland constantly feels depressed and detached. He’s blond and wears an iconic olive military jacket even though he’s implied to be an office worker. In the movie, James is this “bad boy painter” who looks and feels nothing like his game counterpart. Yes, he’s depressed like in the game, but he doesn’t give off the energy that game James does.
A big change for him in the movie is that he’s not married to Mary. It’s weird because that’s the main part of the story. Them being boyfriend and girlfriend does not have the same impact as them being husband and wife.
Mary, along with being James’s wife in the game, had been dying of this unknown sickness, even getting to the point where James kills her either out of mercy or because he was sick of caring for her–it’s up to the player’s interpretation. This is the catalyst that brings James to Silent Hill; he feels guilty about killing his wife.
The movie fuses her with two additional characters from the original game, Angela (a sexual assault survivor who killed her father and whose guilt the town feeds off of) and Laura (a child and friend of Mary).
The two show up in the movie, but it’s revealed that they’re versions of Mary that the town has invented, with the later revelation that Mary’s full name was Mary Angela Laura Crane. This change completely invalidates their characters, making it feel like a big middle finger to the fans.
The movie also changes Mary’s backstory. In the film, she has grown up in Silent Hill, and her father was the leader of a cult named The Order. He later died, but his followers continued his work, which was continuously poisoning Mary for her entire life. It’s later revealed that the poison is what caused her sickness.
By telling us exactly how Mary got sick, the film gets rid of the sense of mystery. It doesn’t let viewers think for themselves. Additionally, the cult wasn’t a plot line at all in the original game. In fact, Silent Hill 2 is the only game in the series that has nothing to do with the cult.
Another important character in Silent Hill 2 was Maria. Maria looks exactly like Mary except more attractive, as she’s supposed to represent James’s ideal woman, and although she mostly stays the same in the movie, a lot of her scenes are unfortunately cut back. Also, the whole “everybody is Mary” thing ruins Maria as a character because she was the only one in the game that was supposed to be Mary.
And then there’s Eddie. In the game, he was a young man who was bullied for his weight until he snapped and shot his bully. Eddie eventually embraces his violent urges and tries to kill James, who in return, has to kill him. In the movie, he has one scene and never comes back.
I’m not kidding. Why include him if you’re not going to do anything with the character? By doing this, the movie creates another plot hole, because at the end of the movie many audience members, including me, are like, “Hey, what happened to Eddie?”
Changes from the lore
For the most part, Silent Hill itself looks like its game counterpart visually, at least. It’s especially accurate whenever James is walking around outside in the titular town. If I had to give this movie anything, it’s that they did a good job portraying that town. I like the parts where James goes to the apartments, the hospital and the Lakeview Hotel. I think the movie did a good job portraying those places.
Unfortunately, this movie does something that really puts the nail in the coffin. It strongly implies that Silent Hill is all in James’s head. Near the end of the movie, James wakes up back in the real world. His therapist is there and she talks about how James is “the only case she can’t fix” and “he just won’t let her in.” Then, James looks out the window, sees a moth and is transported back to Silent Hill. At the end of the movie when James is trying to kill himself you hear someone say, “Mr. Sunderland, Mr. Sunderland, are you still with us?”
This ending is especially unforgivable because Silent Hill is supposed to be a real place–it’s not in James’s head It brings people there who are guilty about something and feeds on their guilt. Implying that Silent Hill is all in James’s head is completely disrespectful to fans. It’s like the filmmakers completely misunderstood the point of the game.
Problems with adaptations
It’s disappointing to see the filmmakers butcher this fan favorite. It feels like they didn’t even have the full idea down when making it. Why is Eddie there if it’s supposed to all be in James’s head? It just doesn’t make sense. Is he supposed to be representing James in some way? Is James’s full name James Eddie Sunderland? No. You know why Eddie’s there? It’s so fans can go, “Ooh! He’s from the game!”
Studios need to stop being trapped in this head space that, when you make an adaption of a video game, you need to make it completely different and make your own spin on it. And if you are going to make your own spin on it, don’t market the movie like you’re going to pick a specific ending from the game and then not pick any of them.
This is a problem with a lot of video game movie adaptations. They take ideas from different games and try to make some Frankenstein abomination of a movie. This whole movie is so removed from the source material. The studio always thinks, “Oh, we can’t make a one-to-one version of the game. That would be boring.” News flash: It’s not boring. That’s exactly what the fans want!
If you want the full Silent Hill experience, you’re not going to get it from this movie. Just replay Silent Hill 2 for the tenth time.
Velocity 
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