Silent Hill
Saw Silent Hill. Seems that critics didn’t like it. Seems that critics are wrong.
I’ll admit right up front: I have never played the Silent Hill games. Matter of fact, I haven’t played any survival horror games. Perhaps, fans of the franchise will find the movie to be the same sort of abomination that Doom was for fans of id’s FPS. My understanding though is that most of the characters, monsters, and locations closely corresponded to their game versions.
The premise is that Rose and Christopher Da Silva adopt Sharon, a girl from a West Virginia orphanage. Unfortunately, Sharon sleep-walks, sleep-draws hellish pictures, and sleep-talks about a place called Silent Hill. Rose finds out that Silent Hill is a West Virginia mining town, abandoned after a massive fire (still burning to this day) in the coal mines under it. She decides to take Sharon to Silent Hill, hoping it will cure her somnambulism. On the way, Rose’s actions raise the suspicions of Officer Cybil Bennett, who gives them a car-chase into town. Finally, Christopher also makes his way to West Virginia, hoping to find his wife and his daughter.
The film did a great job of creating mood. Silent Hill is filled with milky fog, all colors are washed out, the houses are industrial and ugly, the streets are covered with ash and dust. Coal ash falls from the sky like snow. The atmosphere of all hell breaking loose is captured equally well.
The movie was quite scary. On the way home, I kept on imagining the air raid sirens and the descending darkness. Pyramid Head was a brilliant creation, looking like an actual twisted demon and not like some silly computer animation. And the faceless, sexy killer nurses were truly disturbing.
I liked the way the movie made use of game conventions. Rose and Cybil make their way through the town by solving a series of puzzles, each one letting them advance to the “next level”. In one case, Rose finds a knife, which turns out to be required to solve one of the puzzles. As soon as she solves the puzzle, she drops the knife into a chasm — just like in games, where if you use an item to open a door etc. it generally means the item is gone from your inventory. The two women talk to NPCs, loot desks, take quests, solve annoying jumping puzzles, swing on ropes, and even get to watch what amounts to an FMV cutscene. The amazing thing is, all these game conventions actually work well in the movie. It’s the sort of stuff that makes a gamer in me very happy.
The ending is … very odd for a horror movie. At first, when I was watching it, I was extremely disappointed; several people sitting behind me actually booed. However, as I was exiting the theater and started thinking about the movie’s themes, the ending started to grow on me. I think that if you look over the structure of the whole film, it works well. But it’s odd. Watch the movie and see.
So: brilliant visuals, truly frightening creatures, excellent atmosphere, plentiful homage to computer games. Good music too. What’s not to like? Sean Bean.
You see, most of the actors played their roles quite well — very well by horror movie standards. The glaring exception was Sean Bean, who played the father, Christopher Da Silva. Judging by his performance in Silent Hill, Sean Bean would not make the cut in a middle-school drama production. What’s worse is that Bean’s character spends a significant fraction of the movie looking for clues about the town’s history. This subplot is completely unnecessary because the main villain explains everything anyway in one of the final scenes. I do not understand why the director did not make the decision to excise Bean from all the scenes where he was not absolutely required. It would have made the movie shorter too.
Anyway, I defininitely recommend the movie. Just close your ears when Sean Bean comes on screen.