Almost had it....!

Rating: 6/10 (13 August 2006)

Video game to movie adaptation. Are those alarm bells I hear?
Silent Hill introduces us to a rather disturbed little girl, Sharon, and her protective parents. Sharon has been sleepwalking and the final straw for her mother, Rose, comes after an encounter with a very high cliff top. So Rose does what any sensible, intelligent mother does and takes Sharon off to the town of Silent Hill - the name Sharon has been muttering in her nocturnal adventures. Being a horror movie, and with a name as creepy as Silent Hill, we're about to find out this is the place of nightmares.
To get it over with, as a video game adaptation, Silent Hill somewhat bucks the trend and provides us with an entertaining couple of hours. Stunning visuals and production values make it very easy to watch and coupled with the score, it is easy to get lost in Silent Hill. But like a lot of video games (and lets face it, movies too), the storyline has enough holes to rival a sieve. Rose makes countless, illogical decisions and not enough is revealed to the audience as the film dawdles along. Finally about two thirds of the way in and approaching the climax, the film kicks into overdrive and a barrage of revelations are made - which is all well and good but with so much information to take in it all gets rather convoluted and confusing...
I liked the film a lot but it's really a classic case of style over substance. If only they had paid half as much attention to fine tuning the story as they had with the imagery and attention to detail, Silent Hill would really be cream of the video game-to-movie crop.