Looks very cool, makes little sense (in a bad way)

Rating: 6/10 (17 October 2006)

I play a fair amount of video games, but never played Silent Hill, so I really had no idea what to expect going into the movie.
It's creepy, it's incredibly gory and incredibly violent, and it looks very good the whole time.
After that, however, there isn't much. It is like a video game was directly adapted to the screen. In this case though, that's a bad thing. Faithful adaption of the video game it may be, but good film it's not. 90% of the time, I got the feeling that this would make a *lot* more sense had I played the game.
In many cases, things happened for no obvious reason (falling somewhere, ending up somewhere) that didn't do well for it as a film. It wasn't the good kind of 'that made no sense' but rather the bad kind - just a character falling from one situation into the next, very much akin to going through different levels in a video game.
That doesn't make a good movie though. Characters run around doing things you would do in a video game that don't come across as believable on screen - 'run around the town gathering clues' - 'solve this brain teaser' - fine for someone *playing* a *game* but for *viewing* a *movie*, it just wastes time and you're like "Ah. That's nice. Plot please?"
We don't expect Joe Dirt to be Shakespeare, so we don't hold it to those standards. Silent Hill, on the other hand, set the bar high in many ways, only to fail miserably in others. Joe Dirt can never be Shakespeare material. Silent Hill could have.
More or less, you get a very creepy and gory video game translated directly to the screen. As a video game translation, it seems to succeed extremely well. As a movie, you end up just not caring about it, and that is perhaps the worst thing that can ever be said about a movie.