excellent adaptation

Rating: 10/10 (21 April 2006)

This is by far, the best video game-to-film adaptation out there. By far. It's not even close. Forget "Doom" or anything directed by Uwe Boll. This film is the real deal. And while it's not a classic, it's certainly an effective piece of horror.
I think that a lot will be made about how the Pyramid-Head plays such a small role in the film. Well...something tells me that we'll see more of him in future installments, if this film does well. What you do see of him in the film, is pretty hard to forget. The only other minor quibble I have is that Sean Bean's side of the story could probably have been done a little better, but that's easy for us to say. A lot of fans may have liked to have seen his side of the story chopped altogether, but I totally disagree. We need a break from Silent Hill from time to time. It's an intense place, and if the whole film had taken place there, it would have been hard to keep the suspense up, without having the film drag. It'll be interesting to see how future installments are handled.
The story starts simply enough, but gets just complicated enough to where you have to think about what is going on a bit. Alessa (the little girl) does explain things towards the end of the movie, but you still have to piece together what happened in your mind.
The acting is uniformly excellent. Sean Bean is fine in his role, he does what he can with it. Radha Mitchell is an excellent, underrated actress. And she turns what is kind of a one-note character into something more. And Alice Krige. Wow. Let's just say that she gets the death scene of a lifetime towards the end of the film. She is simply marvelous. I would like to see her in films more often. She brings so much class to projects like this.
This film has a lot of parallels with the original Silent Hill game for the PS1. The story I would like to see Gans take on next is Silent Hill 2 for the PS2, which is by far the best Silent Hill game that was made. And a truly haunting story that would translate very well to film.
Bottom line, if you call yourself a fan of the horror genre, you owe it to yourself to check this film out. There have been better ones made, but this is definitely one of the better ones.