Silent Hill is a movie based on the likes of a long time videogame franchise by the same name, differentiating itself from other action games with a heaping dose of creepy atmosphere and disturbing images. Unfortunately the movie tries to emulate that while forgetting that without the interactivity of the game, you lose quite a bit in translation.
The movie starts off in typical horror fashion with our scantily clad leading lady, one Rhada Mitchell, chasing after her stereotypically fucked up adopted daughter. Mommy saves the demon spawn just in time, saving her from a leap off a cliff. The daughter's screams of "SILENT HILL" cue me into a couple of things early on, mostly that I should probably not expect this movie to be carried by dialogue or acting. Back to the movie, the daughter's increasing descent into insanity pushes the mother to take her to Silent Hill, where she thinks her problems will be solved. Sean Bean plays the father here, and I suppose we are to assume there are marital troubles since he isn't invited along on the trip, but no concrete evidence is given either way.
Without delving too much into what happens for the rest of the movie, you can safely assume that they make it to Silent Hill and horror ensues. In an incredibly useless and tacked on subplot, Sean Bean's character is trying to track down his missing daughter and wife. For some reason, the choice was made to let us in on the secret that the Silent Hill that the girls are in is an "alternate universe" of sorts, with Boromir still on earth 1. This is an extremely poor choice because it really takes the air out of the ending, and since the movie was so sloppily written, we are never given a set of rules for each. Plot Holes abound.
I would be lying if I said that this movie didn't get some things right. The very thing that I feared would be hardest to recreate from the game, atmosphere, is here and works in spades. Alternate universe Silent Hill is as foggy and foreboding as the game it was aped from, and the monsters in the movie look great. There is even a nice re-imagining of a famous scene from the Evil Dead. Gore, while mostly CGI, is abundant and pretty damn cool. They are not afraid to let a scene linger on the grusome action either. The climactic sequence rains blood down in a way that would almost make Peter Jackson proud.
There are several critical flaws in this movie. First and foremost, the aforementioned dialogue is amazingly bad. Acting is pretty awful, but given the material they had to work with, I'm willing to give a little. Anne, a Silent Hill citizen is especially horrible at reading her lines(I was happy when she met her rather grusome fate), and Jodelle Ferland as the little girl is extremely annoying. Everyone else gets a pass.
The problem with the monsters is that they do not have consistent appearances. Of all of the different breeds of monsters, the only one we get more than one appearance from is the much ballyhooed Pyramid Head, and his comeback is brief. Especially aggravating is that we are first lead to believe that these guys can only attack after the siren sounds and everything turns dark. That is thrown out the window though when we meet an acid spitting monster during the daylight. Even worse, throughout the rest of the movie, we never see another baddie in the daytime. Monsters aren't the only thing that come once and go away never to be seen again..the radio noise that alerts us of a monster's presence is used once, early on, and sort of forgotten as time goes on.
The biggest flaw of all is Roger Avery's script. The plot tries to mimic the experience of a videogame too much. Videogame staples such as puzzles, item hunts, and even an incredibly stupid, lazy, and overlong expositonal reveal near the end clues us in to what's going on, run rampant. There might as well have been a life bar over the head of the cop. Several shots are meant to mimic the game. An entire act of the movie goes by without any plot progression. This could be forgivable if there was characterization, but it was basically just asking how many ways you can psychologically torture someone. Speaking of characterization, no one ever grows here, it's as if none of our characters are affected by anything, at least until the very end. Any of this could be forgiven if it had any symbolic meaning, but most of it is just creepy and weird for the sake of being creepy and weird. This is an incredibly shallow movie that might fool the weak minded into thinking that there is something more here..but thinking about it at any length should give you the big secret: none of this shit makes any sense and is just an excuse to show what is essentially a 120 minute tool video. The best videogame movie of all time. 3/10
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