I may have posted a written review of Return To Silent Hill, but there were still other things that I wanted to expound upon that I did not feel were appropriate (or in the scope of) a simple movie review. So I decided to adapt my extended thoughts into a video critique. I was planning on doing after having seen the movie in theaters and writing the review, but things kept coming up, and I kept pushing it back until eventually it got to the point that the movie was already available on DVD and streaming.
I decided to split the critique up into 2 separate videos. The first video is already available on YouTube. It is specifically about the sexist and chauvinistic attitudes and biases that I felt underlined many of the creative decisions that went into butchering Silent Hill 2's stories. More specifically, I compared and contrasted how Christophe Gans chose to adapt the characters of Harry Mason (from the first game) and James, and how these adaptation decisions seem to reveal those underlying sexist attitudes and biases. I used this video to vent some long-standing frustrations that I had with the first Silent Hill movie, and its gender-swap of single father Harry into married mother Rose.
My initial video critique was a comparison between the adaptations of Harry Mason and James,
and how both chauvinistically reinforce outdated gender stereotypes.
Obviously, I don't have a problem with gender or race-swapping in adaptations of media. But, as I explain in the video, I felt that the character of Harry Mason presented a golden opportunity to present a competent single father character in a medium that is largely devoid of such examples. The gender-swap from male-to-female, in this particular case, and the reasons that director Christophe Gans cites for having made the casting decision, only serve to reinforce out-dated gender stereotypes, while also missing out on an opportunity to present a particular demographic that is under-represented in popular media.
The second video is about the other characters in the movie, with an emphasis on Mary -- considering that she is basically the only other character in the movie.
I was originally intending on publishing this video to Patrons a week or 2 early anyway, but YouTube kind of forced my hand. It flagged the video for copyright, because YouTube blatantly ignores the general public's rights to Fair Use in order to protect corporate intellectual property. The second video ended up being blocked in basically every country except the United States. The same thing initially happened with the first upload too, so I had to re-edit the video to try to bypass the copyright protection. I tried re-scaling the movie footage, using background video from the game, and splitting the frame between movie footage and gameplay footage of the game. This worked for the first video, but for some reason it did not work for the second video.
So I posted the initial draft of the second video up onto https://www.patreon.com/MegaBearsFan/posts/return-to-silent-161921701. Patreon doesn't seem to mind the use of copywritten content. So now, I will be splitting my time over the next week or so between working on my next video project (which I think might be about the latest updates to Civilization VII), while also trying to find alternative editing tricks to allow the second video to be uploaded to YouTube without being blocked. If that fails, then I may have to just make the Patreon video public after a period of time, and just link to that in a pinned comment of the first video. We'll see.
Generally, I don't have a problem with all the copyrighted content that I include in my YouTube videos, since I don't monetize the channel. Most of the time, the copyright-detectors only limit the videos' monetization, which is moot for me. But in this case, YouTube was particularly aggressive with its copyright enforcement and outright blocked the video in most countries. Since my video content is not monetized, I do ask that fans of my content please consider making a contribution on Patreon. Crowd-funding through Patreon is the only monetary compensation that I receive for my efforts (aside from a tiny pittance from the occasional Amazon Affiliates link that I may include in a blot post).
I lost almost all of my Patreon subscribers due to financial hardships during the COVID lockdowns, and my channel has just never recovered from that. So I appreciate any new or returning Patreons, and I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has, does, and will support my content creation.