Silent Hill (2006) - Movie Review

Good day Internet, I am Torstein from Cinema Terror and today's review is the 2006 supernatural
horror film Silent Hill.
This was based on the highly popular video game series that at the time of this film
had four games out, pleasing gamers with a taste for eerie and creepy entertainment.
I should mention before starting the review that my experience with the games are limited
to a total playing time of 20 minutes and after watching the film I think the enjoyment
of the film will differentiate if you are familiar with the game franchise or not.
The film has on first viewings a very simple story about a woman named Rose who is taking
her adopted daughter to the town of Silent Hill.
As soon as they arrive at the apparantly abandoned town, they get into a car accident.
Rose wakes up and finds her daughter missing and then goes about to try to find her, but
there are evil forces at work in this town that does not want them to reunite.
Movies based on video games has had a bad reputation for years and years, and rightfully
so as most efforts have performed quite abysmal both critically and in the box office.
Silent Hill does manage something that most of these films hasn't accomplished in that
even with my low amount of playing time on the games I think they managed to capture
the feel of the games correctly on this film.
This works both for and against the movie as at times it feels like you would have to
have played the games to understand everything that is going on and some scenes seem a bit
too much like fan service instead of concentrating on telling a story for everyone and not only
those familiar with the games.
The bad parts about it being such a close adaptation is that it spends a lot of time
trying to recreate scares from the games, with the camera angles and the situations
feeling like it could be a shot for shot remake of one of the games.
The problem with that is that games and movies are different formats and what works in a
game will not necessarily work in a movie.
While some of the scary scenes would have made me shit my pants if it was in a game
and I was playing the main character, the scenes don't work for me in the movie.
The use of over the top CGI in nearly all the scary scenes took me out of it and left
me uninterested in what was going on.
And when most of the scenes in the film are trying to creep you out, but fails, overall
the film just won't work.
It also didn't help that the movie drags on for two whole hours.
The film tries to get going quickly by having Rose arrive at Silent Hill without a lot of
time being used on setting up the characters before that, but there are so many scenes
of her running around the town trying to find her daughter while being interrupted by demonlike
creatures that the story as a whole has a slow progress.
Since I didn't care much about what was going on, I got bored quickly with the film and
even though it did manage to bring my interest back a bit, overall I can't say that the film
was able to keep me entertained or engaged in the story.
There was also a useless subplot with Sean Bean as Rose's husband which added nothing
to the movie whatsoever.
This was apparantly not a director choice as he got a message from the higher ups after
delivering the script that the movie needed more male characters, which is just absurd
and a terrible decision.
I do believe that the movie would have benefitted from going down from 120 minutes and all the
way down to 90 minutes without losing anything in the progress.
The French director Christophe Gans was obviously a fan of the game series and he actually spent
five years trying to convince Konami to give him the movie rights.
Gans does have a horror background as he did one of the segments in the underrated 1993
horror anthology Necronomicon, and he also produced Saint Ange, also known as House of
Voices from 2004.
Add to that that he also directed Crying Freeman and Brotherhood of the Wolf, then he surely
had the experience to tackle a project like Silent Hill.
He wrote the movie script together with Roger Avary, who's worked with Quentin Tarantino
on movies such as Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs and True Romance.
They did put the high production budget on the screen and the scenes were Rose is walking
around in the foggy streets are done quite well.
But again, the overuse of CGI did not work for me.
They did a smart move by using nearly identical music scores created by Akira Yamaoka for
the game series, both as a cool fan service and also due to it just being great music
scores that works just as well in the movie as it did in the games.
Silent Hill got a poor critical reception upon release, but did make back nearly twice
it's 50 million dollar production budget in cinemas alone, which did give way for a sequel
called Silent Hill: Revelation 3D in 2012.
That one did ok box office numbers but got panned by most critics and fans.
I haven't seen it and doubt it will have much to offer for me, but if you love this film,
then I'm sure it will be worth seeing for you.
Silent Hill is a good game adaptation, but not a good movie.
It failed in engaging me in the story and characters and the long running time left
me bored at several points of the movie.
I have no doubt that the film could work much better for others though, and especially for
fans of the video game series.
If you don't mind over the top CGI special effects and stuff like that in your horror
films, then sure, give it a chance.
And also if it is available on Netflix or any other streaming services that you got
and you have nothing else to watch, by all means, perhaps you'll find enjoyment in it.
For me Silent Hill is not something I'd want to revisit in the future and while I do see
positive things about it, I can't give it more than the poor score of 2 out of 5.
Have you seen Silent Hill and did you enjoy it more than I did?
Regardless if you liked or disliked the movie I am curious to also hear what your relationship
with the games are and how that affected your viewing of the movie.
Let me know about it in the comment section below, thank you for watching and hope you'll
return for more of my videos in the future.

Silent Hill (2006) - Movie Review

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