Image courtesy of www.impawards.com
Director :
Christopher Gans
Cast :
Radha Mitchell……….Rose Da Silva
Sean Bean……….Christopher Da Silva
Laurie Holden……….Cybil Bennett
Deborah Kara Unger……….Dahlia Gillespie
Kim Coates……….Officer Thomas Gucci
Tanya Allen……….Anna
Jodelle Ferland……….Sharon
If there’s one medium that has not translated into critical or commercial success as a film it has been video games. From Doom and Alone in the Dark to look at the recent past or even back to Super Mario Bros. or Double Dragon, video game movies as a rule tend to be amongst the worst films of their respective years. The high point, if one could call it that, is Resident Evil and its sequel Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Into this rather low level of accomplishment comes Silent Hill, adapted from the video game series of the same name and with perhaps one of the most talked about trailers of the year so far.
Silent Hill follows the path of Rose Da Silva (Radha Mitchell) as she tries to find her daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) in the ghost town that shares the same name as the film. With Sharon having sleep-walking fits and mentioning the town, Rose decides to take her there. Against the better judgment of husband Christopher (Sean Bean), Rose drives out to Silent Hill with Sharon and promptly loses her amidst the folklore of a town long since abandoned due to a coal fire which still rages underneath. From this point Rose, with the aid of a police officer (Laurie Holden), has to go through all sorts of unimaginable terror to try and rescue her daughter from the forces of evil. And it’s from this same point that Silent Hill goes from being the start of a really good film and descends into all sorts of campy awfulness.
Silent Hill has all the makings of a great horror film with action pacing to start with; Christopher Gans knows what he’s doing with the camera, to start with. He clearly has a grasp of how the film should look and which shots to be used, allowing the bleak darkness of the town to command some awe-inspiring shots. Credit Dan Laustsen’s cinematography, as Silent Hill is a tremendously shot movie. The film’s backgrounds and scenery are used well, taking full advantage of the lack of CGI to create a much more intense atmosphere. Hell on Earth, if you will, is dark, scary and realistic. The film is plausible, at least, just due to the sheer factor of how good it looks.
The lack of a plethora of CGI also helps establish a lot of the intensity Gans is going for throughout the film. There isn’t a feeling that it’s laughably fake like some horror films in the past several years have provided. The film’s gore, a prerequisite it seems, is also really well done. The creatures that Rose has to face throughout the film have an authentic look and feel that a computer just can’t generate. Several action sequences come through much more effectively because of the “realness” factor.
And the problem with Silent Hill is that it fails to take advantage of all it has going for it. This isn’t an acting movie, and even quality actors like Mitchell and Bean work their best with the material, but what should be the film’s backbone (its story) becomes its biggest liability. Call it poor editing or poor writing, or both if you will, but the film is very loose on plot to the point where a five minute segment in the middle has to explain it all. The film meanders through action sequences that are well done, and Mitchell is game to bring a sense of vulnerability to a female action heroine that is rarely shown, but the buildup to these scenes is non-descript at worst and lousy at best. Throw in an ending that flat out doesn’t work at all and the first 40 minutes of a two hour film are all flushed down the cinematic toilet.
| CATEGORY | SCORE |
| STORY | 4 / 10 |
| ACTING | 2.5 / 10 |
| LOOK/FEEL | 9 / 10 |
| ORIGINALITY | 4 / 10 |
| ENTERTAINMENT VALUE | 2 / 10 |
