Should have been called Dullsville....

Rating: 6/10 (27 August 2006)

Despite being a big fan of Resident Evil, I never got round to playing the original Silent Hill game on Playstation, and have since spent about half an hour playing the sequel, and found it really boring. But even so, I'm rating this movie based on its own merits, and unfortunately; there aren't many. As you might expect, the film focuses on the spooky ghost town, 'Silent Hill'. It has to be said that director Christophe Gans has done a good job with the atmosphere in the town, but he hasn't done a very good job with the implementation of the action, and Roger Avary's story about Silent Hill is not very interesting. We follow Rose Da Silva; a woman's whose child suffers from trauma in her sleep. When the girl begins to scream 'Silent Hill!' Rose decides to take her to the town that she sees in her sleep. However, it soon becomes apparent that all is now well in the ash covered town, as her husband (Sean Bean, delivering a typically bland performance) finds a website about the town that details its strange history, and Rose finds out about the town's abnormal inhabitants when she comes face to face with them herself...
Probably due to the fact that most video game adaptations these days are rubbish, it would seem the team here were keen to make Silent Hill as 'faithful' as possible...and in doing so, have made a film that would have worked a lot better as a game. The CGI doesn't look good alongside real actors, and because a lot of the film features the characters pondering about creepy locations, it can be very boring. This wouldn't have been a problem if you were playing a game and in control of the characters, but sitting and watching them gets old very fast. The film also seems to have put things that I assume are from the game into the screenplay without a lot of point most of the time; case in point - what was that thing with a metal triangle on its head? The fact that the film runs too long ultimately harms it, as the film soon loses it's way and needs to introduce some kind of cult to further the overly complex and uninteresting story, and it all ends with one of the worst special effects showcases that I've ever seen. Overall, I'm not disappointed with this movie as I'm not a fan of the games anyway; but my lack of disappointment doesn't mean Silent Hill is anything but a bad film.