Screw the narrative, enjoy the visuals.

Rating: 7/10 (17 January 2012)

Coming into Silent Hill I had a small reserve for it considering most adaptations of games to film are typically poorly constructed, however I was met with surprise within the first couple minutes, more specifically when you first are introduced to the character Sharon (the daughter) who is precariously swaying on the edge of a cliff hallucinating a smoldering industrial chasm that seems to sink into a large cavern at the bottom of the cliff until she is tackled and saved from death by the main protagonist Rose. The movie is about a woman (Rose) who has adopted a child (Sharon) that seems to have some underlying psychological issues due to the fact that she frequently screams "Silent Hill" in her sleep. Against Rose's husband's (Christopher)will she tries to take Sharon to Silent Hill in attempts to resolve the problem but is met with a gaggle of new issues including finding Sharon after she has run off from a car accident. What made the movie is strictly the aesthetics, Cinematographer Dan Lausten and Production Designer Carol Spier truly flexed their own abilities in this film and Director Christopher Gans was definitely no slouch in keeping up with the original style, texture, and over-all theme that made the game such a success. I was also quite content that they left in a significant amount of the original composer's (Akira Yamaoka) work to help capture the essence Silent Hill while also adding some more popular and well placed songs as well (Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash.) Now of course for the bad. Unfortunately there are couple areas where the film fell short, mostly plot and dialogue. The Plot seem to have a few too many holes in it that might have been placed for interpretation, however they were clashed somewhere between crucial back stories and seemingly useless knowledge that lead to no where in the film which seems to have confused viewers that lack some background knowledge of the game. As for the dialogue, I personally wished they might have stuck to the title a little more in this regard because the dialogue is a mish-mash of non-sequiturs and pointless whining with very little substance filling lulls, so if they had say kept them a little more "silent" and let the visuals speak for them instead, the film might have had a better response.