Underwhelmingly plotted, visually good

Rating: 5/10 (13 November 2008)

I have to say, I was reluctant to watch this, being a massive fan of the games. A friend convinced me, and I must say that visually the film is excellent. However, there is a sense that the visuals are the 'meat' of the film - something I despise.
Plotwise, the film apes the first game - with the difference that the principal character has been gender-switched (something I found almost entirely unnecessary and actually somewhat counter-productive).
Sybil the motorbike cop is made less ambiguous than she was in the first game, and gone are all references to Metatron as some form of celestial being pulling the strings.
Alessa wasn't used or exposed on enough. Her tale is a tragic one; and in the first game you really grow to feel genuine sympathy for her. In the film, she's depth-less. The whole witchcraft thing is appallingly boneheaded, and totally out of keeping with the 'spirit' of the games.
My biggest bone, in fact, is that Christophe Gans chose to play with the mythos of Silent Hill - whilst an 'official' explanation has never been given, it is the consensus that Silent Hill exists differently depending on the person experiencing it, and that the creatures and so forth (whilst sticking to some repeating motifs) are personal anxieties and fears given form. Which leads me to both a big problem I had with Silent Hill; Pyramid Head.
Make no mistake, Pyramid Head - whilst gorgeously and provocatively rendered - is a stinking abortion in this film. Pyramid Head in Silent Hill 2 (indeed, he has zero connection with Alessa in 'true' Silent Hill mythology) was James Sullivan's sense of guilt and self-persecution at his euthanasia murder of his wife Mary, and the subsequent creation of Maria, a sexier and more idealised version of her (who becomes 'real' in the dark town). In Silent Hill the movie, he's Jason Voorhes - a one-dimensional killer with no substance beyond 'walk towards screaming woman with big knife and kill her'. That Pyramid Head subsequently disappears without explanation is bemusing also. Gans has really fired a blank here; Pyramid Head is potentially a mountainous horror icon that could be the first to break the 'based-on-the-computer-game' barrier. Here, he's flat and - dare I say it - dull. For that, I can't forgive him. Even more perplexingly, the final raft of Alessa-based killing is done gratuitously with barbed wire in a way very reminiscent to the WWI horror 'Deathwatch'. That Alessa was burned to death, tied to a ladder seems to have no relation to her supernatural abilities. Which, frankly, irritated me too.
Plot - 2/10 (I enjoyed Sean Bean's character, looking for his wife, and never finding her even when they were in the same room. That's the only bit of the plot I liked.) Visuals - 7/10 (very good, if more fan-service than anything else. And the barbed wire, as mentioned, was a ripoff)
P.S: What they should've done was made Silent Hill 2's plot into the basis for the films plot. It would've been creepier, more unsettling and more human than this hackneyed pseudo-nonsense about 'witches' and 'faith'.