Gamers Should Be Pleased..

Rating: 8/10 (23 April 2006)

I saw the film last at night after months of waiting. I'd started playing the games at SH2, then played 3 and then 1 to get the whole storyline and although I felt a bit let down by the film in a way, I was very impressed otherwise.
First of all, the main problem for ANY game-to-screen adaptation is the time; a game has eight plus hours to tell you a story in many different forms. In the Silent Hill games, the story is told to you through newspaper clippings, puzzles and character speeches over your playing. Now Christophe Gans had four stories to tell in this film and only two hours to do so.
Thing is, you can't condense four games into two hours, you just can't.
So the film became a little 'drawn out' and characters - especially the religious cult - seemed to explain too much too quickly. In the games, we don't see any of this cult and their actions. In fact, it's very rare that you, as the central character, meet more than one person at a time, which all adds to the fear factor in the games.
A lot of disappointment is in that people are trying to read 'game' and 'film' together. They're two entirely different mediums with entirely different rules. I did feel the film captured brilliantly the sounds (mostly direct from the game) and atmosphere of the games, especially when environments turned 'evil', accompanied by the eerie siren and the darkness closing in. As 'reality' literally stripped away the blood-soaked metallic floors and crawling walls were practically an inch perfect replica of the game whilst the soundtrack and sound effects will strike fear once again into gamers with all the extra-diagetic music coming from all four games.
Gamers will also recognise certain parts lifted straight from games, especially the toilet scene where it turns dark in front of her (there is a room in Silent Hill 3 which turns evil the longer you look at yourself in a mirror) and the apartment building on Silent Hill 2 where you can jump across to an adjacent building. Even the monsters were adapted well with the impressive 'Pyramid Head' from SH2 stealing the show. It's a pity we didn't see more of him/it or indeed a few of the other monsters that litter the games. However, Gans doesn't need to show us a monster every scene to remind us that they're there..
So the usual pitfalls for a game adaptation apply here, but this isn't a Resident Evil. Silent Hill as a film has re-created the games visually in a near-perfect style. The cults history is visually explained rather than a background (which it is in the games) but thats cinema for you - audiences need everything told (which is evident from the questioning on this board!) and Gans has tried to do that in the two hours he has.
I liked it. I liked the games and I've seen a film that is another story about Silent Hill. Yeah, it goes on a bit and could have had this or that added, but every Silent Hill game tells another story about the town. You could call this film the fifth story..