So, with the upcoming re-release of Silent Hill 2 on the horizon, I figured it was about time I (a Silent Hill mega-fan, in case you have been successfully avoiding my social media simping for my lovely wife Pyramid Head) took a look back at the Silent Hill movies. And friends…
I need you to know that I went in to 2006’s Silent Hill, directed by Christopher Gans, with an open mind. Yes, I’ve seen it before, but that was prior to really falling in love with the game series. And, with my expanded knowledge about and passion for the series, the experience of watching this film would surely be improved, wouldn’t it?
But no. Silent Hill is, truly, one of the most aggravating, boring, annoying, and sloppy movies I’ve seen in a really long time – even worse when you compare it to the excellent source material it’s sort-of drawing from. It’s truly an atrocious film, the kind that has you wiggling in your seat after an hour and wondering if there’s something better on somewhere else; even for fans of the franchise, I can’t see this exactly standing out as a must-see. Video game adaptations haven’t exactly got the best reputation to begin with, least of all in 2006 when this originally came out, and this movie might well be a major factor in why movie adaptations were seen as an almost inevitable step-down from their source material for so long.
Because let’s be very clear: Silent Hill is a bad film on almost every level it possibly could be. Despite some really overqualified actors giving it their all (Alice Kriege, I’m looking at you specifically, though Laurie Holden in her T-1000 get-up also puts in a decent shift), the characters are consistently two-dimensional and utterly devoid of compelling backstory. The movie handwaves in the direction of character depth with some random and exceptionally clunky exposition, and lets us fill in the rest, leaving this famously character-driven franchise with gaping great holes (not that kind) and a flabby runtime with none of the compelling character work to raise it above standard survival horror.
The script is a mess, the pacing is genuinely quite shockingly bad, and Sean Bean (who the movie does its best to avoid giving us a full-frontal look at for about the first forty-five minutes, an extension of the hideous overdirection that plagues the film as a whole) is confined to an awkward, weirdly detached supporting role instead of the lead he’s billed as. Gans is constantly wobbling that camera around in an infuriatingly pointless fashion, though perhaps that’s a good thing, given how sensationally ugly this movie is too. Gone is the sinister blend of industrial and organic that fills out Silent Hill in the games, to be replaced by that very specific mid-noughties style of washed-out CGI drudgery that manages to make the most extreme stuff look mundane.
And speaking of Silent Hill itself – look, if you’re a fan of the games, you know this movie is far from a fan favourite, based on how it uses iconic monsters like Pyramid Head and the Bubblehead Nurses completely out of context. But if you’re going to use these creatures wrong, at least use them in a cool way, you know? Like so much of the rest of the movie, these monsters are toothless, with Gans unable to contextualize them to give them any real meaning or threat in this movie. Pyramid Head, undoubtedly the franchise’s most iconic monster, isn’t even present in the final showdown, rolling up to stroll across the back of the frame occasionally like a local scurrying out of a tourist’s family holiday snap. They’re fuck-ugly to boot, all jiggle physics and badly-aged CGI (the few glimpses of real effects in this movie are, by far, the highlights), as are the rest of the monsters in this movie’s roster. But thank God I got to see a woman get barbed wire up her fanny, I guess.
And I understand making some changes to the dense lore of the original game, but again, if you’re going to make these changes, do something interesting with them – turning Silent Hill into some Christian-coded cult of Good and Evil, dictated by those traditional values, lowers it into generic territory, especially against the uninspired backdrop of the actual town itself.
Silent Hill isn’t just a bad adaptation of the games – it’s just a bad movie, straight-up. It’s boring, uninspired, derivative, and a frustratingly bland take on a franchise that really does offer a lot of room to play for creators who want to break away from the original games somewhat. I’d love to know what you think of this movie, whether your a fan of the games or not – does it stand up to the games for you? Does it work as a horror movie in its own right? Let me know in the comments below!
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Reddit)
No But Listen 