Visually Awesome but Incomprehensible Garbage

Rating: 3/10 (23 October 2006)

Well, after seeing this whiskey-tango-foxtrot of a movie I found out later it was based on a video game. Well, that explains a lot, since most of the film resembles a video game, with the lead character running through mazes/levels trying to find her daughter. But what is admittedly a very visually-satisfying film suffers from a lack of coherence and stupidity on a scale so massive, you don't know what you just saw and, frankly, you don't care! The film starts with the girl who suffers from sleep-walking and finds herself on the edge of a huge cliff (???). Her parents rescue her while the girl, in a sleep-state, shouts over and over "Silent Hill!" (in a not too convincing manner...the acting is, well, abysmal). This plot development takes literally 90 seconds of the film. Bingo-bango, her mom is taking her to, yep, Silent Hill! That'll cure her! This journey begins not two minutes into the movie. On the way, a motorcycle cop stops the mom. Mom pulls over. Cop approaches car. Mom immediately GUNS THE CAR AND TAKES OFF. Why? What human would do this for no apparent reason? I guess we're not to ponder this question. Mom is now (on a rainy, unfamiliar road, mind you) driving break-neck speed towards Silent Hill (a ghost-town in WV) and...get this...crashes full speed through a chain-locked barricade. Again...huh? WTF? Of course, she crashes the car and when waking up, daughter is gone and she finds herself right smack dab in the middle of ash-rain ghost-town alternate-universe what-the-you-know Silent Hill.
Now the movie is square into video-game mode. Our heroine (mom) sees a fleeting glimpse of a girl in a building. Mom enters (unfamiliar) building. Mom (with the aid of a single cigarette-lighter which never runs out of fuel or dies) proceeds to work her way through an unending maze which no sane person would ever find themselves able to back-track. Why? Heck, we've been asking ourselves this for the last (check the watch) 20 minutes! Mom encounters several scary looking creatures, surroundings, menacing-sounding civil-defense sirens, etc.
Oh yeah, the motorcycle cop arrives and hand-cuffs mom, after explaining that she dumped her bike a bit back (now we're starting to think, oh, I know, everyone is dead!)...both meet some mad, old woman who spouts out some pseudo-cryptic-occultish gibberish...more running through different buildings (you know, like levels of a video game)...they meet various "bosses"...run some more...get "keys" and other clue pieces...
..this goes on for two-and-a-half-friggin' hours. And then in the end there is some more psycho-babble about evil and witches and "not one of us" and the townspeople (???) try and burn the girl but the girl has a spirit double who IS evil and wreaks havoc on the townspeople (who are....dead? alternate universe? who cares!).
And in the end mom and daughter get back in the SUV, leave Silent Hill and get home...but is it home (I mean, dad has been home the whole time and he's alone and everything looks...real. Mom and daughter are in the home but...everything is kinda foggy and ethereal, like it's home but in an alternate universe? Dead?)...
Whatever! The three stars I give this are STRICTLY for the stunning visual graphics. Yet graphics a film do not make. Buy the game (sounds cool!) avoid the movie and and thank me later.