Review of Silent Hill (2006) by Fraser M — 09 Sep 2012

"Silent Hill" is a disgrace to the video game carrying the same name. It's like Roger Avary ("Pulp Fiction", "Beowulf") went out of his way to write a terrible screenplay and Christophe Gans ("Brotherhood of the Wolf") tried his best to direct a movie with bland CGI, horrid plot developments, and low octane acting. Well, not all of the acting is bad. Sean Bean and Radha Mitchell are actually pretty good, but they should have turned down this movie immediately after reading that script.

The movie starts out with two parents, Rose (Mitchell) and Christopher Da Silva (Bean) who wake up one night to find their daughter, Sharon (Jodelle Ferland), missing. They find her at the edge of a giant cliff, where she's chanting "Silent Hill, Silent Hill" over and over again. For some reason, since she's such a great parent, Rose decides to take Sharon to, yep, you guessed it, Silent Hill. Apparently, the reason for this is because Sharon is dying from some sort of disease and Rose wants to see if taking her to the town will help any. If it's cancer that Sharon is suffering from, she's screwed, because no amount of sightseeing will cure that. Silent Hill is a ghost town in West Virginia that nobody has lived in for over 30 years because of the mine fires beneath the town. What Rose doesn't realize is that there's not a more fitting name than "ghost town" for Silent Hill. When Christopher realizes that Rose and Sharon are gone, he sets off after them, as does a motorcycle cop named Cybil (Laurie Holden) who stopped Rose and Sharon on their way to Silent Hill.

Rose gets distracted on the way and is frightened by a little girl standing in the road whom she swerves to miss and accidentally crashes. Cybil crashes as well. When Rose awakens, she finds that Sharon is not in the car with her anymore. She gets arrested by Cybil, but when Cybil attempts to escort her from the town, she finds that they are separated from the rest of mankind by a giant chasm that seemingly stretches for miles. After that, they both wander the town in search of Rose's daughter and the truth about what's really going on in Silent Hill. Throw in an evil twin, a monster with a pyramid-like head (kudos to the filmmakers for keeping that element of the game in), and a crazy cult and you have...I have no clue. The plot is so undecipherable that even Robert Langdon would have trouble cracking the code.

The first disappointment will be noticeable to fans of the game, which I am one of. It's the fact that instead of a man searching for his daughter, the filmmakers swapped the role to an obviously more feminine one. As a matter of fact, if you dig far enough, you will find that they had to be persuaded to add any male characters at all to the film. Thank God that Sean Bean became involved because that raised my rating of the film from one and a half stars to two. Now, in the movie itself, the male-female swap is a minor problem. I understood the film well enough in its opening moments, but by the ending, and especially because OF the ending, I was scratching my head in undeserved puzzlement. I have looked up several sources on the Internet in an attempt to find an explanation for that ending, but none of them cleared it up for me personally. Instead of trying to explain it myself, I will just say that is was stupid.

Overall, the film is bad, but it's one of the best video game movies that there are. However, when you live in a world of one-star video game movies, two stars doesn't seem like much of an improvement, and it's not. If you're interested in some creative ideas that could have been better implemented, you might want to check out Silent Hill. But if you're like me and aren't particularly interested in a movie in which a woman gets her flesh entirely ripped from her body, then you can agree with me when I say, "Heck nah.".

Note: This is the longest movie review I have ever written. I think I did a great job.

Critics who agree:

Roger Ebert, Chicago-Sun Times: "They talk and talk and somehow their words do not light up any synapses in my brain, if my brain has synapses and they're supposed to light up, and if it doesn't and they're not, then they still don't make any sense. 1 and ½ stars.".

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: "A few of the images are startling, but as Radha Mitchell (a good actress) wanders through a ghost town, searching for her lost daughter as though she was touring an abandoned movie set, Silent Hill is mostly paralyzing in its vagueness. D+.".

Bill Gallo, Village Voice: "Stuffed with cheap effects and devoid of tension, the French-Japanese-U.S. co-production contributes exactly zilch to the rich film history of those three nations; the most horror-crazed teen may be hard-pressed to find any authentic thrills here. 40 out of 100.".

Lou Lumenick, The New York Post: "A great-looking but stupefyingly incoherent supernatural thriller adapted from a popular video game that ransacks the entire catalogue of horror tropes for more than two mind-numbing hours. 1 star.".

Wesley Morris, Boston Globe: "Tens of millions of dollars were spent to tell us what we should have known going in: that the makers of the movie you're slogging through will spare no expense to demonstrate how much they hate us. Do us a favor. Tell them the feeling is mutual. ½ of a star.".