Silent Failure more like it

Rating: 1/10 (26 June 2012)

There are many things I dislike about this movie. It's not scary, the characters act like idiots, and most of all, it is nothing like Silent Hill. I'll try to explain what I mean.
First of all, the random changes. I understand changes having to be made to go from one medium to another, I really do. But when the changes are either small enough to make you wonder why they bothered. Changing the little girls name from Cheryl to Sharon for example. Or large enough that it seems stupid. Harry Mason being a woman named Rose with a completely different personality as another example. And it just makes you wonder what they were thinking.
Oh actually we do know why Harry was changed into a woman. They thought searching for your child and going through hell to find them, was a nurturing act and it better suited a woman. It's also the reason they had Sean Bean in his useless scenes that added nothing. Because people said there needed to be a male character with all the women. I WISH I WAS JOKING. So because a father can't care enough about his adopted daughter, they replaced him with a woman. Glad to see sexism is ever present here.
Which brings me to my next point. The entire movie is seeped with an overwhelming theme of "motherhood" that did not exist in the game at all. They even turned the antagonist of the first game, into a sympathetic character to help with this. This of course led them into having to create another antagonist out of nowhere.
So the cult then. There's a lot of cult members. As in you see them. There are a lot of people in this movie. Which rather brings down the feeling of isolation you are supposed to get from Silent Hill. You see cult members in this movie, not just a few of them, you see a church full of them. Silent Hill is not scary when it's filled with people.
Very few things resemble Silent Hill in this movie. There is no symbolism behind the monsters. Pyramid Head shows up for no reason other then he looks cool, I'm sure. The town is abandoned from the start, which only serves to make Rose look like a horrible mother when she decides to take her kid there in the middle of the night. Harry Mason was going on vacation with his kid to the town of Silent Hill. A normal town is implied to be there, you just can't see it. In the movie? Well it was already abandoned.
I could go on. I really could but to put it bluntly. This is a horrible movie. It's nothing like Silent Hill save for a few monsters and even they don't fit in.
If you are a Silent Hill fan, do not watch this movie. Despite the title, it isn't Silent Hill at all.