Long-awaited Silent Hill 2 movie adaptation, Return To Silent Hill, is being panned by critics ahead of its launch this Friday (January 23).
READ MORE: ‘Silent Hill 2’ review: masterful horror remake dials up the dread
Director Christophe Gans’ “faithful” adaptation of Silent Hill 2 was announced back in 2022 and saw Gans return to the Silent Hill franchise after leading the cult 2006 adaptation of the original game. Shooting for Return To Silent Hill took place in 2023 and the film is finally set to launch later this week.
“Return To Silent Hill is an adaptation created out of deep respect for a true masterpiece of a game, Konami’s iconic Silent Hill 2. I hope fans will enjoy and be fulfilled with the experience this new film has to offer,” Gans said when the film was first announced. It stars Jeremy Irvine as James Sunderland, Hannah Emily Anderson as Mary and Evie Templeton as Laura.
However, the movie hasn’t been received well by critics. “20 years later Gans still can’t figure out how to escape the open-ended confinement of gameplay, or even give it the forward momentum of a game with a mission,” reads The Guardian’s two-star review of the “middling” movie.
“Return To Silent Hill’s most glaring flaw is that it doesn’t do anything particularly new or exciting with that formula. Given the sheer graphical fidelity of the Silent Hill 2 Remake, the prospect of seeing the game’s events play out in live-action simply isn’t enough. Heck, the game is by far the better-looking of the two,” say IGN in their review.
“Return To Silent Hill‘s nonsensical story strips its 2001 source material of all moral and emotional complexity, leaving only elementary shock value from its original story of a widower tortured by guilt,” reads Total Film’s one-and-a-half star review.
“Woof, absolutely brutal. I kinda thought we had moved past the point where video game adaptations were absolute steaming dumpster fires. Then again Borderlands did come out last year so maybe we aren’t out of the woods yet,” wrote one fan on Reddit. “This is exactly what I expected the moment they put ‘from visionary director Christophe Gans’ in the trailer,” added another.
Return To Silent Hill currently has a 9 per cent score on Rotten Tomatoes and a “generally unfavourable” rating on Metacritic. Luckily things are more positive in the world of video games – a critically acclaimed remake of Silent Hill 2 was released in 2024 and last year saw the launch of the incredible Silent Hill f.
In other news, the planned remake of Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time has been scrapped at Ubisoft as part of a major shake-up.
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