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 Jay Seaver
"The annoying thing is, this could have been good."
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At the turn of the century, a French filmmaker named Christophe Gans made one of the best action/adventure films in recent memory, "The Brotherhood of the Wolf". Since that time, he's been attached to other promising-sounding projects, but they all seemed to get stuck in development hell somewhere along the line. His name being attached to the "Silent Hill" movie was a surprise, but one which perhaps said good things about a film derived from a video game than rather than bad things about his career. The good news is, that turned out to be the case. The bad news is, it's not nearly enough.Gans is a talented director, and he and his crew throw some great, creepy visuals up on screen. He's good at using special effects, he can stage a heck of an action scene, and he's not bad at building tension at all. When the movie finally got to its big ending set piece, it kicked into pretty high gear, delivering a whole raft of nasty/fun gross-out bits and a suitably cataclysmic finale. I'd be pretty willing to absolve him of blame for all the parts that aren't up to snuff - not reasonable, I know, but I loved "Brotherhood" so much - except that the thing could probably stand to lose twenty minutes, and his name did pop up when the writing credits appeared on screen. Sure, Roger Avary is credited with the screenplay, but screwing things up this bad takes a team effort.
The basic idea is only kind of stupid - cute adopted elementary schooler Sharon DaSilva (Jodelle Ferland) is sleepwalking during nightmares, saying the name "Silent Hill". Mother Rose (Radha Mitchell) finds out there's a Silent Hill in West Virginia, and Sharon came from a WV orphanage, so maybe by taking her there they'll be able to jog whatever repressed infant memory is causing it. Of course, she doesn't read quite enough on the internet; it's up to her husband Christopher (Sean Bean) to find out that the town is abandoned, its toxic air fed by still-smoldering coal fires underneath. By the time he finds this out and calls her, Rose and Sharon have entered the obligatory zone of spooky bad cell phone receptions and irritated Cybil Bennett, a local cop (Laurie Holden). Rose runs off the road, Sharon wanders off, and while trying to find her, Rose and Cybil discover that the fog and smoke are perhaps the least dangerous things they have to deal with.
So... okay. The plot of Silent Hill is kick-started by the characters doing a whole bunch of very stupid things; it's got to be something like half an hour into the movie before most audience members will look at anything Rose does and consider it a wise course of action. That sort of thing is irritating but not fatal; it's presented as less-than-brilliant moves that people advise her against, so what follows can be as the tragic results of her actions. It's the mechanics of the rest of the film that are the real problem. In a video game, going to a spot, finding a scrap of paper, and then making your way to the place indicated feels natural - it is, after all, a game, even if it has had a story grafted onto it. Once it's happening with actual people, though,it is quickly recognized as an absurd way to go about business. Rose and Sharon are looking for a nine-year-old girl; while it's reasonable to assume that her hand-drawn picture of a school might be pointing you in the right direction, how does what you fish out of the mouth of a mutilated corpse logically direct your actions after that? This is a search and rescue, not a spooky scavenger hunt!
The script gives us pretty weak dialogue, too - the characters say very little that's not clunky exposition. This gives the cast very little to work with. Making the best of a bad situation is Radha Mitchell, who at least seems sincere and driven by love for her daughter. It's not a great performance, by any means, but we believe it. Alice Krige is icily malevolent as the religious fanatic with the answers, and Deborah Kara Unger is the right kind of miserable as a mysterious second mother without her daughter. It's downhill after that, though. Laurie Holden is robotic, often to the point where I wondered if she were trying to mimic stilted videogame delivery (heck, when she first appears on-screen, I thought her gait was a spoof on the inhuman way gaming characters walk, but it might just be the only way she can move in that form-fitting costume). Jodelle Ferland plays Sharon in a way that's so sugary that I almost expected her to substitute W sounds for R sounds. She's a little better when the movie gets into possession/doppelganger territory, but not that much. Sean Bean and Kim Coates as the detective he encounters just outside Silent Hill are stuck delivering exposition. Lots and lots of exposition.
I've never played the game(s), so I can't say whether Gans and Avary have a problem with being too faithful to the game or straying from it, but even if they hit the sweet spot of faithfulness, they didn't make a very good movie. It's got some nice atmosphere, and while that can be enough for a horror movie, this one runs on a little long - when you've got both DaSilva parents basically learning the same thing, there's got to be some redundancies that can be cut out. When Gans gets into the mood to freak the audience out, he's not bad at doing that at all, but he doesn't use the time between those moments to unnerve us, or make us curious, or give us a false sense of security; it's just functional getting from point A to point B.Which is unfortunate. This movie has the ability to impress, but immediately after it does so, it tends to fritter that good will away.
link directly to this review at http://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=14326&reviewer=371
originally posted: 05/05/06 20:18:46
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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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