Tired and battered by life, James Sunderland looks into the horizon, covered either in a sleepy veil or in transparent latex. This haze has been hiding massive and faded trees for centuries. But a lot of things in Silent Hill are not what they seem, so the landscape, riddled with romance and hopelessness, resembles a tidy condolence card.
James's beloved wife passed away three years ago, but a miracle happened recently. He received a letter from her inviting him to meet at “their special place”. The deserted city, stuck between life and death, beckoned with the darkness of a rotten well that promised real miracles. Dead people don't usually care about letters, but this place gives them plenty of time to describe feelings they didn't have enough time for during their lifetime.
In the sad but still life-affirming original, the fog-filled space reflected James's soul. It turned inside out his subconscious aspirations, predatory fears, and suppressed memories. The widower wandered through the labyrinth in pitch darkness, bumping into holes in the walls, sinkholes and tunnels, heard the breath behind the locked doors and groped down into the bowels of the earth.
The remake of “Silent Hill 2” not only does it allow you to relive the suffering of an ambiguous hero, but also changes the original story, which now feels like a roguelike, as James now suffers in two worlds at once. In the “old” he passively swims through the haze of nightmares that have come true, and in the “new” he meets his own demons fully armed. These are two completely different feelings both from the game and from its interior space.
The sensual atmosphere and high tempo are superimposed on the familiar narrative and allow the main character to look not only at himself, but also at his surroundings. James's hell has never been visualized in such detail; there is almost no room for new meanings. The poetic emptiness dissipated with a gust of wind.
Thanks to the existence of the original, its updated version is a translation of a familiar story. In each of them, the same character travels through two nightmares at the same time, but the events differ in strokes. The original “Silent Hill 2” is based on a leisurely exploration of the environment and a description of James' feelings. The remake, meanwhile, focuses on cartography of the outside world, dotted with traumatic sights.
The updated geometry is richer not only in details, but also in freedom of movement. James is more impetuous, theatrical, and open-minded. His inner rage blows outward, attacking enemies and abandoned shop windows. He sees and hears more, talks more artistically and shows emotions, and seems to know much more about what's going on than the player.
In the original, James was slower and more passive, unable to jump over even a small barrier, and the battles reflected his unenviable physical condition. And he talked detached and confused, as if he had a multi-layered dream without questioning his logic. The other inhabitants of the city also did not ask any further questions and descended into the depths of a poetic nightmare.
The detached, almost inhuman lines of the characters in the “original” story clearly emphasized the absurdity of what was happening, referring to David Lynch's surrealism (read our text). The actors' voices were not accompanied by the natural reverb of the rooms; they were echoed only by booming silence. This made you feel not ordinary strangeness, but real discomfort — even simple conversations resembled a panic exchange of questions and answers with inappropriate intonations.
The authors of the remake diligently transformed not only the visual range, but also the sound: they made it multi-layered and selected professional actors. However, in the process, they lost the lion's share of the atmosphere and originality, which for years had been hidden not in the main plot elements, but in a combination of little things.
When you watch two James pursuing the same goal, you'll notice that they do it in different ways, with a different pace, focus, and presentation. The elusive essence remained in place — it was strengthened, tinted and more effectively directed, but something important was lost along the way.
The updated story no longer hints or uses complex images, but rather recites slightly distorted meanings. Meanwhile, James is vividly showing newfound emotions that once rested in a dark rift in the middle of a misty wasteland. Relatively subtle and not always convenient, impressionism has become the cover of a fantasy novel.
Putting together the apathy and self-loathing he had accumulated during his first visit to the misty city, James shrugs off reflection. In the remake, he is more direct and takes revenge on himself much less ingeniously. The fateful videotape still rests in your pocket, and the words in the letter dissolve without a trace. The catch is that their content is different for each James.
Contrary to popular theory, events are not locked in a time loop but are rather an obsessive-compulsive narrative. James's trauma, the inability to remember his once beloved wife and at the same time forget her merge into one with a destructive sense of guilt. The black mass corrupts the main character and over and over again torments him with a stream of images. In some ways, they change, become more complicated or simplified, but they invariably cultivate trauma.
Perhaps James will think about the black mass during his third or fourth “vacation” in a foggy town — with the birth of another rethink or remake. But first, he will have to take all his “memories” to the accompaniment of industrial noise, cartography a familiar hell and listen to the heartbreaking monologue of his beloved Mary.
