I CANNOT BELIEVE people are gushing over this pile

Rating: 5/10 (21 April 2006)

The Silent Hill movie is getting a lot of 9's and 10's from reviewers on this site. I'm not sure why.
I am a fan of the games. A *HUGE* fan. A huge, huge, huge, huge fan. But I was VERY disappointed with the movie.
Yes, there were some good things in the movie. There were some excellent ISOLATED SCENES. There were good visuals HERE AND THERE. The soundtrack was USUALLY good. SOME OF THE ACTORS did well. I'll admit all of that.
But.
The other 75% of the movie was lacking. I'm not sure why people are saying the movie was "faithful to the games" when the plot line was completely INCOMPATIBLE with the one in the games. Some characters were the different, and some characters were the same but the events surrounding them were different. But either way, it just didn't match up to the well-established story we know and love.
There were also a lot of moments where the atmosphere was not at all like what the games give us! The games are about loneliness, and isolation. In the games, there are never more than three people (or monsters) in a room at once. No, that's not because of technological limitations -- it's because the designers deliberately planned it that way. The movie, on the other hand, has several crowd scenes. In case you missed it, I'll repeat that -- CROWD SCENES. IN SILENT HILL. What??? Silent Hill is not supposed to be a place where you have a room with twenty people in it. Nor it is a place where you have a hallway with twenty monsters in it. That's ridiculous. It ruins the whole effect.
And speaking of "ruining the effect," let's talk about how often this movie has us LEAVE Silent Hill. The games remove us from the setting SOMETIMES, and VERY SLIGHTLY. The movie, on the other hand, removes us from it FREQUENTLY, and VERY SEVERELY. Right after a creepy scene in the foggy snow, it will suddenly cut to a screen full of bright green trees and blue sky -- two things that have NO PLACE in a Silent Hill movie.
Like I said, the movie did a lot of things right. But not nearly enough to carry the weight of the entire movie. I found myself shaking my head and sighing JUST AS OFTEN as I found myself impressed, if not more so. It does do a lot to make fans of the series happy, but it also does quite a lot to make them furious. The bottom line is, the Silent Hill series is something I love and feel protective over, and when people sully its good name I feel offended. Five stars out of ten.