I saw Silent Hill the other night with my roommate. For those of you that didn’t know, it’s a video game movie. And for those of you who realize that video game movie is equivalent to crappy movie: I’ve got news for you – you’re wrong. I think this is perhaps the first big Hollywood movie based on a video game that was actually worth the ticket price.
Silent Hill is a story about a little girl who has very vivid dreams and sleepwalking issues. They’re constantly getting worse, and her parents can’t really do anything about it. Sometimes she talks about Silent Hill in her sleep, and sometimes she ends up wandering off into dangerous situations involving cliffs or highways.
Since she can’t ever remember these occurrences when she wakes up, her mother, Rose, decides that perhaps the best thing to do is to find Silent Hill and take her there so little Sharon can remember. They figure it might have something to do with her birth parents, as Sharon is adopted. As is often the case in horror movies, this turns out to be a very dumb idea.
Rose and Sharon head into Silent Hill, and crash trying to avoid hitting a child crossing the street. When Rose wakes up, Sharon has once again disappeared. Rose tries to find her daughter in what seems to be a completely abandoned town. Occasionally she sees a girl darting around town, and she tries to catch her. After following what she hopes to be her daughters footsteps down a dark alley, sirens go off and she finds that Silent Hill is pretty much (in the literal sense) hell when that happens (with really awesome CG transition from foggy, ash covered Silent Hill to metallic, rusted, burning Silent Hill).
To go on would – of course – ruin the story, but the surprising thing about this movie is that there’s actually a story to ruin. Most video game movies are so horribly lacking on storyline I didn’t expect this one to be much more than a thinly veiled attempt to show lots of monsters killing things. Yet I was pleasantly surprised to find myself completely drawn into the very well written story that is very psychologically deep (almost as good as Donnie Darko).
For other important things in movies, soundtrack and acting, the movie was not at all lacking. The soundtrack was completely haunting and my roommate and I want to find it for sale somewhere so we can buy it. I thought the acting was very well done. The father character probably didn’t have a strong enough role for most people to fully connect to him.
I think the critics don’t give it enough credit because there’s a very healthy amount of nightmarish violence and gore, or because they’re unable to fully understand what is going on in the movie. This is the best video game movie ever made. My roommate and I both hope the DVD version has the full length cut, which was rumored at 3 hours+. This movie will definitely become part of our collection. 4.7π out of 900º.
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