Silent Hill

Directed by Christophe Gans
Written by Roger Avary (screenplay), Nicolas Boukhrief (story), Christophe Gans (story)

First of all, how 'bout a big hand for Akira Yamaoka? How cool was it hearing "You're Not Here" and "Letter - From the Lost Days" on the big screen? And kudos to the studio (or Gans or whoever) for allowing as much of Yamaoka's original music as they did. Hawttt doesn't begin to describe it.

I'm by no means an expert on the Silent Hill games -- I've only played the first and the fourth ones, and only for about an hour each at that, and only about enough to know for sure that a) I like the mood/look/tone of the thing, and b) they are waaaay better than the Resident Evil games, as in you get to run around everywhere instead of doing that weird spinning chicken-walk thing, and do I really have to see some cheesy cut-scene EVERY time I go up and down stairs or open a door? I know I'm opening the door! It's a game, it's what I just commanded you to do! Asses.

So anyway, yeah, just saying. Not an expert on the games, so the movie wasn't, like, beholden, if you know what I mean.

The story (of the movie) involves a young girl named Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) who suffers from some sort of mental illness that neither her adoptive parents nor her doctors can figure out. She sleepwalks, experiences lost time (during which she frequently draws creepy stuff), and during her "spells" often speaks of a place called "Silent Hill". A little Internet research turns up the fact that there actually is a place called Silent Hill, a small ghost-town not on any maps (the town was abandoned after the mine underneath caught fire - a fire still burning to this day) very near the orphanage on whose doorstep Sharon was first discovered nine years ago. So, mother Rose (Radha Mitchell) decides to spirit Sharon away to Silent Hill, very much against the wishes of her husband Christopher (Sean Bean), to try and maybe figure out what the deal is with their daughter. They arrive in town, Sharon disappears, and then all sorts of creepy and gross stuff happens.

It's actually pretty interesting (and a pretty close approximation of my personal vision of hell) until they start explaining things. The final explanation, something about witches or a witch-hunt or something, didn't make a bit of sense to me.

While they were in the mood to explain things, I would have appreciated a word or two about the semiotics (semiology? systology?) behind some of these demons (or whatever). Okay, the burned children and the nurses were a no-brainer (hey, did anyone else start singing "We are young / No one can tell us we're wrong" in their heads during the scene with the nurses? Or was that just my tumor again?), but why, for example, did that guy with the pyramid for a head have, like, a pyramid for a head?

There's a story going around that the original script did not have a single male character in it, and that the Sean Bean character and the detective (Kim Coates) were added by special request of the studio at the last moment. If true, it shows - the two characters lift right out of the movie, and any exposition provided in their scenes could very easily have been provided elsewhere.

I was really looking forward to this one, too. The trailers and posters and stuff certainly made this one look a bit smarter than your run-of-the-mill horror flick, or game adaptation for that matter. Unfortunately, aside from some pretty creepy imagery, Silent Hill winds up being just more of the same. Damn.