I honestly feel that without the AMAZING and PERFECTLY done score, Silence would not be so great.

Granted the Director(who aced everything in the film), Actors(amazing), and everyone els einvolved all did a fantastic job, the score truly added the final crushing blow to this film.

Manhunter's protagonist, Will Graham (William Peterson), is the man who caught Hannibal Lector (Brian Cox, who plays the character very similar to how Anthony Hopkins did) and he does it by re-creating for himself the killer's mindset.

The Red Dragon of the book's title refers to Francis Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan, also a great director), whose fantasies are delved into with great detail. What is addressed in this film, but not in Silence, and avoided in Hannibal (it is the point of the book it's based on) is that a serial killer is not born that way; they are made.

Graham and Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina) have a discussion about this when Crawford expresses horror at the fact that Graham shows sympathy for the Tooth Fairy (as they know Dollarhyde). Graham responds that he feels sorry for the child that once was, so hated and abused that the adult he became commits unredeemable acts.

The end result of Dollarhyde's fantasies are that he will become loved and accepted, and for a brief period of time, he is allowed this.

This very complex portrayal of the killer is very much at odds with Silence's simplistic Jame Gumb.

The 2 DVD set has the added bonus of including the director's cut, which adds a few interesting scenes with Graham's difficulties, the most important of which is a scene at the end when he visits the family he determines would have been Dollarhyde's next victim... just to "see" them, implying that while the literal Red Dragon has been killed, the one that he had been cultivating in his head still needs to be excised.

I found it interesting that, in an attempt to make Hannibal more commercial for the film, any reference to Mischa, Hannibal's sister, is dropped. This makes his attraction to Clarice mystifying in the film version, and the alteration of the ending makes the film pointless, taking away the story arc that Silence, with its over-idealistic Clarice going up against a cruel and unyielding world, starts.

I have heard that there is an intention to make yet another sequel to Manhunter, and, given the fact that Hannibal has been so altered for the film version, I fear that Hannibal Lecter will become the next Freddy Krueger.