Overall Rating
  Awesome: 19.19%
Worth A Look: 25%
Just Average: 23.26%
Pretty Crappy: 25.58%
Sucks: 6.98%
11 reviews, 106 user ratings
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| Silent Hill |
by Brian McKay
"Made by fans and for fans, but not a guaranteed fan-pleaser"
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Being an avid fan of the SILENT HILL video game series, It's admittedly difficult to put that fanhood aside in order to compose some kind of impartial review. But the bottom line is, the film was made primarily for fans of the games (and I mean the hardcore fans who played all the way through, not the ones who played it for a few hours before moving on to Dance-Dance Revolution), which means that two types of people are likely to be left out in the cold: Purist fans who will balk at all of the liberties taken with the story, and non-fans who are wondering what the fuck they've been watching for the last two hours.In defense of director Christopher Gans (BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF) and writer Roger Avary (KILLING ZOE), both of whom are self-proclaimed fanboys of the games, SILENT HILL is not the easiest of games to adapt for the big screen. Although many will (and already have) complain about the film's vague and confusing plot, many many more have been arguing about the vague and confusing plot of the video games for years. The first SILENT HILL game alone consists of four or five different endings depending on choices made in the game, and all of them are fairly nebulous.
However, I have always contended that the strength of the SILENT HILL games is found in their uniquely horrifying atmosphere, rather than its obscure plot machinations that are full of vague references to demons, cults, rituals, and otherwordly dimensions. In that regard, the film SILENT HILL succeeds equally well as an exercise in horrific atmosphere, taking its sweet time in the first act to build suspense and a sense of intrigue about the "ghost town" of Silent Hill.
When their adopted daughter, Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) begins to have frequent nightmare-induced bouts of sleepwalking, concerned mom Rose (Rahda Mitchell) decides to take Sharon to the place that she always mentions just before she wakes up - an abandoned town called Silent Hill. Once a prosperous mining town, it has since been left empty due to the coal mine fires that have been smoldering under the town's surface for decades, leaving the atmosphere full of thick haze and snow-like falling ash.
Rose takes Sharon there against the objections of her husband, Christopher (Sean Bean), who thinks that medication is the answer to Sharon's problems. But Rose knows better, and is convinced that the only real answer to Sharon's condition can be found in Silent Hill. But upon entering the town limits, Rose swerves off of the road and passes out, only to wake up and discover that Sharon has disappeared. As she tries to track down her daughter on foot, she quickly discovers that things are far from normal. The whine of an air raid siren warns of an impending darkness, a darkness full of all kinds of disturbing and unsavory creatures. As she investigates the town, discovering clues that lead her towards her daughter, she also encounters an unlikely ally in kick-ass motorcycle cop Cybill Bennet (Laurie Holden) , as well as a group of ragged survivors who take refuge in the town's church, which is apparently the only bastion against the frequently encroaching darkness and its creatures. Meanwhile, Christopher goes looking for his missing wife and daughter, finding none of the same nightmarish occurrences in the abandoned husk of a town, but finding some troubling answers about his daugther's origins in the county archives of the next town over.
All in all, the story unfolds in a manner very similar to the games, with characters discovering clues that lead them to the next location, where more clues are to be found. While this may be an engaging way to draw in someone playing a video game, it's a little less intriguing watching it happen to someone else on the big screen. However, if there is one element that SILENT HILL absolutely nails, it is the game's atmosphere. Visually, the film is a dead-ringer for the games (even borrowing several of the camera angles), and the town's constant physical transformations as it shifts between planes of reality are astonishing. Likewise, the musical choices are impeccable. I couldn't tell whether they were recycled from the games, or newly composed using the in-game music as a template (I suspect the latter), but either way, the score is perfectly haunting, and the inclusion of "You're Not Here" fromt the SILENT HILL 3 game soundtrack over the closing credits is sure to be a fan-pleasing touch.
But while Gans and Avary make a laudable attempt to include elements of all of the games, they may have tried to cover too many bases. The inclusion of monsters like the one known by fans as "Pyramid Head" are a nice homage, but ultimately feel superfluous as no explanation for their presence is offered and they quickly drop off of the radar by the film's unfortunate misstep of a third act, where it tries to explain too much through a long and clumsy flashback segment that is accompanied by an equally long and clumsy voice-over full of expository dialogue. But the more they try to explain things, the more convoluted the matter becomes. If anything, Gans and Avary are guilty of trying to over-explain things that are best left open to interpretation, as they are in the games. This also seems like an effort to dumb down some of the backstory, as the denizens of Silent Hill are portrayed as simple religious fanatics who want to burn all outsiders as witches, rather than the more sinister cult members of the games who practiced ritual child abuse in order to bring forth a manifestation of their dark god. Alas, many of the Lovecraftian overtones of the game are absent here, and many of the interesting ideas about the town's history presented early on are pretty much overlooked and forgotten by the film's finale. Nevertheless, the film partially redeems itself with an appropriately grim and enigmatic ending that leaves the film perfectly open-ended for another trip back to mysterious town in another movie.All in all, the filmmakers may be hedging too many bets, trying to make the film both acceptable to fans and accessible to newcomers. But while SILENT HILL is far from perfect, it is at the very least a valiant effort, and one that succesfully captures the primary elements of the horrific world of Silent Hill. Like the games, the final result is left open to the fans interpretation, and all of the nods to the various games in the franchise alone are worth a repeat viewing. The fans can only hope that in the future, the filmmakers will learn from mistakes made in the narrative process, while proceeding full-bore with the film's grimly distinct atmosphere.
link directly to this review at http://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=14326&reviewer=258
originally posted: 04/24/06 13:17:30
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USA
21-Apr-2006 (R)
DVD: 22-Aug-2006
UK
N/A
Australia
31-Aug-2006
![[trailer]](/images/icon/trailericon.gif) Trailer
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