Yet Another Silent Hill review
Undead busty leggy nurses ftw!
Possible spoilers ahead.
First, let me just say that any movie with a Johnny Cash track automatically gets a star. Or a thumb. Or whatever iconic yardstick you choose to granulate your ratings with. It gets one of those. The spooky jukebox started playing Ring of Fire, and I was like “oh hell yes, this movie is gonna have to completely suck ass before I can even call it mediocre. So Silent Hill dudes, good call.
Second, let’s talk about the plot. Aaaand…we’re done. Now let’s critique the plot. I would say the plot sucks, but that would be an insult to plots that suck. (The plot to Battlefield Earth would be all over my ass, and I don’t think I could take that kind of heat.) To say there is a certain lack of plot might be more accurate. It’s your classic story of “girl sleepwalks, woman drags girl to far away town, woman loses girl, man loses woman and girl, monsters chase woman, man flails around trying to find woman…blah blah blah,” you know the story.
Acting. Bad. Not Steven Segal bad mind you…perhaps Keanu Reeves bad, although if the cast were to own up to the acting suckage and still be offended by the comparison I would certainly concede the point. I also concede that when making your movie selection, you don’t see The-movie-based-on-the-game movies to re-live Citizen Cane. Just be aware that you won’t be pleasantly surprised on this score.
At this point you should know that I haven’t played any of the Silent Hill titles, so I know nothing about how accurate (or inaccurate, according to the geek squad sitting in front of me, who were seriously pissed that the writers had apparently gotten it all the fuck wrong) the depiction of the film version is. I can say, however, that I was amused (in a good way) at the nods to the genre. Collectibles, for example. Those goddamned collectibles that are the reason I don’t play these kinds of games. For example, our heroine starts with a simple lighter for her first light source. Later she finds a key that unlocks a drawer, revealing a flashlight, and still later in the movie she is upgraded further to the Big Fucking Flashlight. (BFF) There is even a jumping puzzle. I thought I could hear the geek squad in front of me whispering “Right, Down, Left, Left, Down, Right, Right, Down, Left, X, Square, Circle.” I thought it might be my imagination, until the heroine stumbled, almost fell into the pit, and one of the geeks yelled “SQUARE GODDAMNIT, I SAID SQUARE!” *
Visually, Silent Hill is a treat. I’ve seen some complaints in other reviews about an over-use of CGI effects in the movie, but I read an article somewhere (and forgot to save the link) that very few of the effects are CGI. It was on the internet so it must be true. In any case, it was a good blend. Except for the mutant demon cockroach swarms. Those were just terrible. And not in the “ahh look at the terrible scary mutant demon cockroaches that look nothing like poorly animated CGI bugs on a tight budget” way.
There was a sub-plot, and I’m pretty sure it worked like this: Oh no, we are under run-time by about 25 minutes. We need something else. Oh I know, how about we make the father go running after his wife and child, because that’s what he would probably do. We’ll just have him drive around screaming into a cell phone, breaking into buildings and yelling at nuns, and oh yeah we should have an understanding policeman to help him do all that. Except that we’ve already shot everything else, so whatever he does cannot affect anything. Trust me, it’ll work.
Except that it didn’t. The sub-plot was a distraction and really put the hurt on the pace of the movie. Imagine watching an Indiana Jones movie and every now and then they cut over to about 5 minutes of cricket commentary on BBC2. And not with the hot chick who wears the thing, but the old guy with the glasses and the white hair and the stained teeth. It was like that. Only with Sean Bean, who actually is nice to look at.
Art direction is really where Silent Hill shines, and the geek squad was inclined to agree. The mood is eery, and the use of sound (including the use of no sound at times) was perfect. The exteriors, blanketed in ash, are washed out and almost formless, giving the town an ethereal sense of other-worldness. The interiors are dingy and shadowy, and you just know there is something hiding in every shadow.
Did I mention how bad the acting is? Let me give you an example. There is a scene where the 2 main characters and some nut job they just met have to hop across a narrow chasm in the hotel. The cop lady goes first, then helps the main character across. Then the camera switches to the 2 main characters in the dark scary place they’ve just hopped into. A beat goes by, and you’re wondering where nut job went. And then she sort of stumbles into the scene, awkwardly and with no offer of help. The audience laughed quite a bit at this scene, but I was never quite sure if the director meant for for the scene to be played for a laugh. The geek squad was not amused.
There’s a lot of head-scratching stuff like this in the movie. Motivations are never fully explained, or they don’t make a lot of sense. Why, for instance, did the motorcycle cop tip her hand to the baddies that her gun was empty? There are certain stupid behaviors we expect from our horror movie casts, such as the entire group splitting up at the worst possible time. But when stared down by a bunch of badass mofos and a definitely scary bitch whose vocabulary consists of variations on the phrase “burn her,” even the dumbest short-bus-ridingest Freddy Kruger victim would know to keep that ruse up for-fucking-ever if need be.
In the end, Silent Hill mostly works on a sheer entertainment level. The visuals are amazing, and except for the flashes back into the real world, the pacing is decent. There are a few surprises, a few unexpected twists, and some genuinely interesting situations. If Silent Hill is a disappointment, it’s only because the missed potential is so glaring. With better writing and a more coherent script, it’s even possible that this could have been the game-to-movie film that we could finally shove into Uwe Boll’s face and say “See? This is how it’s done!” (Actually we could do that anyway because Silent Hill owns just about anything Uwe’s ever done.) In the end, I can’t bring myself to say it succeeds, but it doesn’t really fail either. The highs tend to be high, and the lows are pretty damned low. Like the fictional town of Silent Hill, it’s sort of caught in between.
* You do know by now that about 20% of what I report as factual is, in fact, complete bullshit. Right?
April 27th, 2006 at 8:33 am
Thought it was closer to 60%. Who knew!
April 27th, 2006 at 6:53 pm
There was a sub-plot, and I'm pretty sure it worked like this: Oh no, we are under run-time by about 25 minutes. We need something else. Oh I know, how about we make the father go running after his wife and child, because that's what he would probably do.
I read, on the internets, that it was actually more like: Dude, you movie has nothing but chicks in it. That'll never sell. Needs more Boromir. And lo, it was.
For the record, I loved the movie, and think it would be a lot better without those tacked on scenes.
April 28th, 2006 at 3:13 am
Yeah, that sounds pretty much what happened: studios interfering again.
Suprised that the geeks in front of you claim the writers got it wrong as an adaptation: Roger Avary took the job because he loved playing Silent Hill so much. He mentioned in his (now absent) blog that he and the director, Christophe Gans, used to get distracted when writing the script by constantly playing the game “as research”.
I reckon it's the usual “I'm more of an omniscient geek than thou” syndrome.
Still, I've neither seen the film nor played the game so I can't really say much more than that.