Huh?

Rating: 2/10 (5 September 2006)

I've read so many comments calling this film a good or accurate video game adaptation. If it is accurate, then I intend to never play the games. But good? Well, let me put it this way, if the people telling me this film is good told me that the sky at midday is blue, I would get another opinion. To me, there are three kinds of video game film. The good (Resident Evil), the ones that are bad but funny (Wing Commander, Double Dragon), and then there is the kind that Silent Hill are. So excruciatingly boring that they make one feel like time has come to a complete stop. Einstein's theory of relativity is proved here, because having a modeling file poked into my urethra for two hours would seem to take less time than would watching Silent Hill once more. Maddox once wrote of Daredevil that the two most important characters, Transition and Cohesion, were missing. These characters are almost all that Silent Hill has, with Motivation, Background, or Investment sitting somewhere backstage with their fists stuck in varying orifices.
From what I could discern, the plot revolves around an adopted daughter whose constant fits of sleepwalking and cries about a place called Silent Hill drive a woman to take the girl to the town she has been moaning about in a strangely coherent manner. Shortly after arriving there, we are given the impression that these two have somehow entered a parallel dimension in which strange demonic creatures roam the night, and the town is somehow deserted save for a group of cultists during the day. None of the mechanics of the situation are explained to us. Whereas Resident Evil was kind enough to inform us from the get-go that it would be concerned with an evil conglomerate that funds its aggressive incursion into the free market with secret biological warfare research, Silent Hill expects us to piece together the background for ourselves. The problem here is that unless you have played the video game on which the film is based, you are going to have a very hard time understanding the how or why. For two solid hours I waited in vain for something to explain the situation.
What makes it even worse is that when the film does stoop to explaining what on Earth has been going on for the last couple of hours, no real answer is provided. We hear how a girl has been burned to death by some incredibly sick people and that she somehow disrupts the entire spiritual balance of the town around her so that it is sucked into the tenth level of hell. No word, however, is given on what mechanics allow her to accomplish this. It is literally as if the director chose to cut out every scene or piece of dialogue that would allow the story to make any kind of sense. No explanation is offered as to what the various creatures of the Hill are, either. Often, their powers or abilities are displayed only for plot convenience, or because the director thought they might look cool. Look, maybe I am going about this the wrong way, so I will ask you a question about building in order to get my point across. If you build a flash-looking brick house that has three layers of brick all forming an outer wall that little can break through, yet build the foundations out of cardboard, do you expect the house to stand up? What makes it even worse is that a great cast is wasted upon this abortion.
Radha Mitchell, I was against from the get-go for her part in Mozart And The Whale, another piece of garbage written by a screenwriter who simply cannot write. Sean Bean is so grossly underused that you could literally blink at the right times and miss most of his scenes. Deborah Kara Unger and Alice Krige could have made great foils, but the script does not allow their characters a semblance of nuance. Their performances seem phoned in because their characters are cardboard cutouts. Laurie Holden does the best she can with the role of a policewoman, but she ends up bearing the brunt of the nonexistent foundation. Her character has no real motivation to follow our hero and her daughter up the road, and even less to join our hero on what would undoubtedly seem like delusion. None of the characters behave like real people, even when they have all sorts of convincing plot reasons to do so.
All this could have been forgiven, but Silent Hill also suffers from having half an hour worth of plot stretched to a length just north of two hours. The Twilight Zone used to wrap up this kind of plot in around forty minutes or so. I swear, if I had seen that same shot with a silhouetted girl running away from the hero one more time, I was going to burn down the cinema in protest. Speaking of protest, I thought it was a rule in cinema that when you have a vague or symbolic ending, you do something beforehand to explain what your symbology means, or give your audience a clue to react to when the credits roll. Which brings me to summarising what Silent Hill is. Just as Jennifer Lynch tried to confuse us into acquittal with Boxing Helena, Christophe Gans tries the same trick with Silent Hill. Just as Lynch failed, so too does Gans, although the real failure in this case comes from Gans' laziness. It becomes incredibly obvious after thirty minutes that he just did not give a crap about this project.
For that reason, I am giving Silent Hill a two out of ten. I have seen plenty of bad films made out of video games, but this is the first I can officially call boring.