Good, but not Great, Silent Hill

Rating: 7/10 (25 April 2006)

First, I need to make it perfectly clear that I am a *huge* fan of this game series. Because of that, I had impossible to live up to expectations going into it, and I was completely prepared for this movie to suck. Well, I can safely say that the movie does NOT suck. However, I cannot say it is the slam dunk of a movie I had hoped it would be. I'd give it a 7 out of 10. I wanted to rate it higher, but there are some issues. Again, this comes from someone thoroughly in love with the games, so your mileage may vary.
The visuals are excellent, and there is a loving attention to detail to try to mimic the world of Silent Hill in this film. The rust and decay of the otherworld is very apparent and it feels every bit as dank and "oozy" as it does in the games. The expanded spaces, however, make them feel less ominous than they could have been. Silent Hill is a world that envelopes you, fills you with dread, and ratchets up the tension while you work your way through figuring out what is going on. The games thrive on claustrophobic places, intense decay and a world that warps from (relatively) normal to completely abnormal with the passing of one room into another. While there is an attempt to mimic this, the scope of the movie and the visual scenery is much larger. As such, that tension never quite gets worked up. There are definite moments where you jump, but the "feel" that you get from the game doesn't quite get replicated here.
The strength of the Silent Hill games is the engrossing story, and the movie does its best to create a story that uses elements of the first three games and harmonize them, while introducing new and unique story elements for the movie. This is where I think they faltered. For fan-boys like me, there's lots of fan service in the movie. There are many areas where you flash back to the game and see this element or that scenario or that creature. While fun, it's with this blending of old and new that strong enemies of the series are rendered to be just another menacing figure on the screen. The biggest example of this is "Pyramid Head". In Silent Hill 2, he represents something *very* significant, and the discovery of what exactly he is drives much of the story. Here, he's just a hulking creature with a really long knife and a tendency to destroy people... and then nothing. Huh? To be fair, the most interesting creatures of the games came from Silent Hill 2, which is much more visually strong in comparison to the first Silent Hill, yet it felt strange to see many of these creatures and so little significance placed upon them. While the attempt to get all of the "favorite creatures" in the game is certainly appreciated, it made several story sections feel "mashed". Also, many of the new elements (lots of people never part of the games narrative now having large roles, the secondary story with Rose's husband), while they add layers to the story, they don't really add additional clarity. Were I to give any one suggestion to the filmmakers on this (like they'd care LOL!), it would have been "tell the whole story as it appeared in the game, or create a whole new story". Flitting between trying to create a story from the game narrative and preserving so much, but then altering many of the points that made the story work so well in the first place, made for some confusing moments.
I was overjoyed to hear during the production of this movie that Akira Yamaoka was doing the songs and the sound effects. In that capacity, the movie ranks head and shoulders with the games. Akira's music and atmospheric noises have always been integral to the story of Silent Hill, and hearing the opening refrain from "Homecoming" made for a great buzz and set the stage nicely for the rest of the movie, as did hearing so many other key passages from the first three games. It was also a nice touch to include Mary Elizabeth McGlynn singing two game's signature numbers, "You're Not Here" and "Letter from the Lost Days".
To those not familiar with Silent Hill, this is a good survival horror film with an interesting and convoluted story. For those who are long time fans of the series, it's a nice homage, and it does a number of things well. However, since this is Silent Hill we're talking about, using adjectives like "good" and "nice"... is a bit of a letdown.