T w e n t y S i d e d
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I’m just about done blogging about this movie, but there are a few things that I want to note.
Kotaku notes that contrary to most impressions, most of the imagery in Silent Hill is not CGI. I was surprised to learn this as well. It turns out the FOG is done with CGI, though? This is odd, since fog was one of the very first special effects ever developed, and we’re actually pretty good at that one. The difference between the impressions of gamers and non-gamers is quite dramatic. Kotaku comments on this as well. A few random reviews from around Technorati: Bastard’s notebook liked it. Joystiq was not impressed. The verbosely-titled As far as I have gone was very disappointed. acid for blood really liked it. cinematical was very positive. Rotten Tomatos shows that only 24% of the critics liked the movie. However, among the cream-of-the-crop (the favorite reviewers) the movie gets the big 0%. A shame, but more or less what we expected among people who hadn’t played the game. See also: My previous post on odd entries in the casting list. My post on game elements that were depicted in the movie. My first impressions on the movie. |
UPDATE: I want to add the everyone mentions how useless the Sean Bean (the father) storyline is, and how it’s a distraction from the main plot. It doesn’t add up to much in the end, and doesn’t impact the outcome of the main characters.
I think the whole reason for these scenes is so we can see the bright and sunny world. The fog of Silent Hill is always more unsettling after coming back from the real world. Still, wasting a half hour on this part of the movie just so we can have a nice visual contrast seems like an awful abuse of the viewer’s time.
STILL MORE UPDATE: Steven in the comments below points out the Ars Technica review and a couple of Real Life Comics on the movie: one and two.
Twelve Years
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
Revisiting a Dead Engine
I wanted to take the file format of a late 90s shooter and read it in modern-day Unity. This is the result.
Bowlercoaster
Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.
Skyrim Thieves Guild
The Thieves Guild quest in Skyrim is a vortex of disjointed plot-holes, contrivances, and nonsense.
Grand Theft Auto Retrospective
This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.
Ars Technica liked it, too.
Here’s a couple of cartoons about the movie: one two
Those are great.
Thanks.
I actually heard that Sean Bean’s parts were added after the fact because there were no male characters in the movie. So he was added in to appease the male aspect of the story, I felt it was just a distraction from the movie and probably made the slowness of the plot even more slow and drawn out then necessary.
Panzertron’s Review is really good, he enjoyed the games and has a good perspective on it from that point of view. Not having played the games I was an outsider to the story and the franchise.