Nothing more than fanservice? I don't think so. That view is bluntly ignoring all symbolism in the Silent Hill movie. Why else are the monsters there? Of course there is a use for ol' PH, maybe not the same as the games, but still there in a still major (though different) way. Keep in mind the money goes first, and including an "icon" is bound to attract more viewers and more cash.Falconv1.0 wrote:You can rationalize the decisions made all you want the source material was still pretty much handled like fan fiction. You realize appealing to a niche group of fans pretty much never works out for this kind of stuff...right? The reason videogame movies are never received very well is because of how weighed down they are from the source compared to say, movie adaptations of books. A good example would be The Shining by Stanley Kubrick, which was pretty different from the book to the point where it made for a completely different experience. However, it made use of the interesting concepts from the book so it worked in that way.
The Silent Hill movies pretty much just go "oh Pyramid Head was cool so let's take him and have him show up acting like a fairly generic super monster with no real relevance to the plot". If they're going to use a character as iconic as Pyramid Head, why not actually make use of the traits he had in SH2? He wasn't just a bad guy and he most certainly was not replaceable. Which is the opposite of how he is treated in the film, he is nothing more than fanservice, aiming towards the lowest common denominator tbh.
What about the Shining? Did Silent Hill 2006 not make enough interesting uses out of the ideas of the original games? IMO it did, and a whole bunch more as well.