Well, I just got back from Silent Hill. After months and months of anticipation, I get to sit for two hours in a theater sweating my ass off with a sold out crowd (and yes it was sold out). Fun.
The first hour or so of the film is just absolutely150% percent Silent Hill. If you have played any one of the games in this series you will have every possible button pressed by what Gans and his very talented crew pulled of here. The change from fog to darkness is handled with superb technique. The film simply
looks wonderful and exactly how you would want/expect a film based on Silent Hill to look. The audio is orgasmic. Fans of the games will go into a frenzy when they hear Yamaoka's music. There is just a slavish, and I do mean
SLAVISH devotion to capturing, maintaining, and bringing to life the atmosphere and world of Silent Hill. In that regard, it's a true success in every sense of the word in my opinion.
The creatures are brought to life with utter perfection. I swear the appearance of each new creature is almost like a reward for the viewer. The first time one of the gray children appears to Rose it got an audible gasp from the audience and gave me a good jump. The Janitor is a putrid creation and the yells it omits while Rose scrambles to get away were unnerving as all hell. I'm sure we're all familiar with the token "Needs more cowbell!" joke from the good comedians on SNL, but good lord this film "Needs more Pyramid Head!” On one hand I'm glad they did not overuse him. On the other hand, he is so perfectly realized that I was disappointed I didn't see him more. Let's just say that when he does show up, he makes his presence known (and felt).
Fans of the game that expected the film to be full of townsfolk alongside Rose will be pleased to find that to be completely untrue. I do believe that general audiences out there will lose patience with the first half of the movie as it entirely involves Rose exploring the town and following consecutive clues to Sharon and Alessa's location. There are long stretches of silence and almost no exposition. It's absolutely what I wanted from this film and I was ecstatic to see the exploration elements onscreen and alive.
Where things start to become problematic for me though are in some of the dialogue and script choices. There are some genuinely bad lines of dialogue that just slap you completely out of the movie. It’s just very amateurish stuff such as Rose making comments like "There must have been a fire here" in a town where ash falls from the sky. No shit Rose.
There are a few other bits that bothered me, but I think you'll understand my meaning if you've seen the film.
I've seen some criticism of the Sean Bean/Christopher side of the film. Along with how it's unnecessary and detracts from the main storyline. I disagree to an extent as Rose provides the emotional "anchor" that Bean needs to push on and uncover what is so special about his daughter and why his wife has disappeared. It also ties in heavily to the sublime ending. Bean doesn't have a lot of material to work with here, but he does a decent job of it. He should have just dropped the American accent though. It goes in and out regularly and I just kept saying to myself "Just be the Bean Sean".
There is some lost opportunity with the character of Christopher though and that's something I'll touch on a bit later as I discuss the very exposition heavy second half of the film.
On the subject of performances, Radha completely carries this film on her shoulders. She does a damn fine job of it too. She's sympathetic, you know she loves her daughter, and she really does a fantastic of job reacting realistically to the absolute crazy shit going on around her. Laurie Holden gives a good performance as Cybil. I do wish her character had been given time to develop though. As is, she is simply a companion for Rose and someone that wants to help her out of sheer kindness.
Jodelle Ferland is hit or miss for me. She does a serviceable job as Sharon but some of her line delivery was really off at times. She fares much better as Alessa and the dark half of Alessa especially. Gans successfully avoided the cliché "Ring" style creepy little girl and went in a completely different direction with her. She is terribly cute though and entirely serviceable in the end.
Some of the other players are only in the film for a limited time. Tanya Allen is pretty much useless and
Kim Coates is your typical beat cop with a history tied to the town, and Alice Krige serves as the villain of the film playing Christabella who is an amalgamation of Dahlia from the first game and Claudia from the third game.
This brings me to my absolute biggest disappointment with this film. I despise the changes to Dahlia's character. I don't dislike it because it's different from the game. I dislike it because it's bad decision making on the part of the filmmakers. The entire theme of this film is about the connection between mother and daughter.
It's just an unnecessary change that drains what could have been a HUGE emotional element to the film. Besides that, Deborah Kara Unger is sorely, sorely underused in my opinion. She gives one of the better supporting performances and I can only dream of what she could have done with Dahlia if they had made the right choice for her character.
Aside from that, there are rare moments when Gans can be a tad too slavish to the games. When Brookhaven hospital is finally revealed there is a scene where Christabella points out a map of the hospital to Rose and tells her to memorize it as it could save her life. The map is an exact replica of the one you'll find in the game and not surprisingly the whole thing came off really "wink wink" cheesy to me. Thankfully (and as noted), that scene is rarity.
My other caveats with Silent Hill begin almost immediately after Rose enters
After having been dealt a good hour of ambiguity, I was not a fan of the "lay your cards on the table all at once" approach Gans and Avery took.
Here's where I think they missed an opportunity with Christopher's/Bean's character really. He spends some time in the film tracking down Alessa's past and then is forced to give up all of a sudden. Some of the reveals during this bloated exposition scene could have easily been discovered by Christopher and then slowly revealed to Rose via Dahlia (if they had to make the change, at least use her for something!). This would have left for only one last reveal and that was of
That just would have worked far better for me in the end and it's ashame the Gans decided to pander instead of sticking to his guns as he did so well in the first half of the movie.
Also of note is the
It's not for the faint of heart. (So much so that during one particular death, two couples in my theater walked out of the film entirely)
Finally, we come to the ending. I'll be frank in saying that while the latter half of the film was a bit of a "valley" for me after an hour of nothing but "peaks", the ending saves all. It's poetic, it's heartfelt, and it's a big f-you to your typical Hollywood ending.
In the end I really enjoyed the hell out of this movie. It has its flaws and some of them did disappoint me quite a bit. Nonetheless, this is by far the most capable and well made videogame to film adaptation out there. Some would consider that faint praise, but please bear in mind that when I say that, I mean to say that Silent Hill is a good film and well worth viewing.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by JimiC
Was it a dream? Are the dead? Are they in a parallell universe?
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Doesthe film need to spell it out is the better question? Don't play any of the first two games if that's the case because they deal very heavily in ambiguity and allowing the player to draw thier own conclusions. The film ends on much the same note. Whether they have died or gone over to a parrallell universe is inconsequential. What is clear is that Rose and Sharon are lost to Christopher. The film allows you to interpret that as you will.
