Not so Silent Hill

Rating: 5/10 (17 August 2006)

I played Silent Hill 2, a few years ago, although I never adhered to the big fans of the series. I'm more a Resident Evil kind of guy - staying in the characters and in the storyline, not so much in the psychological realms of 'what the heck does this mean?'. So, in a way, I'm envious, because the movie looks a lot like the games (although there seem to have been a lot of compromises in constructing it - characters from one game, storyline from another, etc; or so my big SH fan - informer tells me).
However, Silent Hill suffers from a totally different disease than the Resident Evil franchise: the games are very engrossing, mind-boggling, they take you to the edge of perception and logic. A really hard thing to do in a film, without making it feel shallow and cold. Such an attempt would call for a great script. A script which, sadly, turns out to be so uninspired and poorly written, that it ruins all the fun.
The story about a mother looking for her child - mysteriously drawn to the town of Silent Hill - is nothing but a long and tedious pretext for atmosphere. I hate to say it, but to make Silent Hill so 'worldly' as a story about witchcraft and silly monsters just isn't creepy enough. You do feel at times that the director tries to transfer ideas from the world of the games to the world of film, in the sense of Silent Hill being not only a typical 'ghost town' story, but also a metaphorical place of demise and sin, the most horrid depths of ones mind - a big, entrenching nightmare. But this barely works. In the end you're left with silly lines of dialog, mediocre acting at its best (not that one could have done much more with such lines) and - what I felt it to be - mundane lighting (in the idea of what scares you most is what you don't see; just that it doesn't quite work).
I may have enjoyed the musical theme at certain moments, as it had a very dreamy ring to it - as it should've. But then again, it just wasn't enough. For a film which is two hours long, Silent Hill has very little contents to offer. It's not even the nightmare I always dreamt it to be.