I hope Ray Bennett reads my LiveJournal!

Friday, April 21, 2006 » gaming movies

As of this morning, Silent Hill only had one critic's review linked over on Metacritic, probably because the studio didn't do any advanced screenings. That one reviewer, Ray Bennett of the the Hollywood Reporter, gave the movie 20 out of 100, but what I really thought was cute was the excerpt on Metacritic. Here's the full quote:

Witless, soulless and joyless, it displays its video game origins throughout as Mom promptly loses the kid and spends the rest of the film looking for her in a multilevel maze filled with fire and nasty-looking creatures.

Now I have no idea whether the movie is actually good or not, but I suspect that if the game was faithfully represented in the film, it would be pulling in some dramatically different commentary. Bennett is basically just tossing out a sound bite as I'm sure he has no idea what the original game is like. Ebert even laments in his review that maybe he'd have enjoyed the movie more if he had played the game. I'm not familiar with how reviewers prep for a screening of a derivative film, but shouldn't they spend at least a little time with the original so they can actually have some context? I don't imagine there were many critics who tossed a single line into their review of Pride & Prejudice about how it must have been based on a novel because the characters spoke in sentences and paragraphs.