I went into this movie with low expectations...

Rating: 1/10 (21 April 2006)

...and somehow, the movie completely shattered those low expectations -- that is to say, this movie was so amazingly bad that my limited vocabulary really can do little to explain just how bad it was.
But let me step back for a moment and explain myself. The original Silent Hill is one of my favorite games of all time, and went I heard that there would be a Silent Hill movie and finally saw the trailer, I was cautiously optimistic. Sure, some of the CGI looked a little cheesy and the acting didn't look particularly great, but really, it looked a lot better than a lot of the other video game-to-movie adaptations I'd seen in the past.
And then I actually went to see the movie.
You know, despite some awful acting at the beginning, I felt that the first ten minutes of Rose's stay in Silent Hill were portrayed fairly well. The visuals were rich and eerie, the use of CGI was spare, and the soundtrack complemented the atmosphere very well. However, shortly thereafter, the film begins to get worse. And worse. And worse. You eventually realize that every moment of the movie after the first half hour is progressively worse, so that you're essentially seeing the worst part of the movie yet, over and over and over again.
The plot is virtually nonexistent until about 2/3rds of the way into the movie when the film delves into an unnecessary, detailed ten-minute diatribe about who Alessa Gillespie is and why the town of Silent Hill is cursed, and so on. At this point, the plot becomes completely convoluted and worse, pedantic. This isn't high art or poetic at all. It's trite, and in the worst way possible -- the film's progression into a reflection on the pitfalls of dogmatism is hardly insightful, but rather, predictable.
Worse still is Sean Bean's character -- it's painfully obvious that his presence was merely tacked on after the completion of the rest of the film, as it is hardly integrated into the fabric of the plot well, and plays into a horribly clumsy conclusion to the film.
All in all, I am extremely disappointed, and if I had not yet found inner peace through the consumption of alcohol, I'd probably be pretty angry that the name of Akira Yamaoka had to be tacked onto this turd -- though I was initially pleased to hear he would be doing the soundtrack, as I love his work, it's painful to see it attached to such awful film-making.