Movie Review - Silent Hill

Eh.

Having played the game, I was impressed initially with its faithful rendition of the plot, but was quickly disappointed and in increasingly large increments as the story departed from the original in ways that I have come to recognize as standard when doing a game/comic to movie crossover.

The movie's gotta differ enough that it's not just the script of the video game, and parts have to be adapted that just wouldn't make sense otherwise. Like walking around with a katana, which in a video game makes sense, cause well, it's a fantastic unlockable secret weapon that allows you to make short work of random enemies, but well, there are no such things in a movie, cause the viewers aren't in control, and she's not gonna die if we stop watching for a minute.

But certain plot adaptions are just, though predictable, total crap. See, in the game you really are working to hold back the apocalypse, it's not just the incorrect fanatic ravings of some religious zealots who the horribly burned Alessa made a pact with some dark force to take revenge on by making her twisted hate a dream world reality the citizens of the town were trapped in. Alessa is the key to a secret cult of demon worshipper's summoning some ultimate evil, and the story really is pretty well fucked up.

The special effects were just amazing, as could have been expected, and you know it was done by a bunch of guys that played the games avidly in high school and college and wanted to take on the project once they got jobs in animation. I just wish they would have applied it to a purer form of the story.

But I guess I understand, seeing as Silent Hill is one of the few games that actually freaked me out during play. It's actually deeply creepy and disturbing, and to make a movie that accurately depicted that would, well, really push away the majority and make it a movie purely for those devoted to the game series, which, monetarily speaking, would be a bad idea. So then they gotta go and make it about split personalites/revenge/motherly love/struggles against blind faith and religious fanatacism which I guess I understand, but, I mean, well, ugh.

Anyway, as far as game/film crossovers go, I give this movie a 4 out of 5. Bonus points for creepy demon guy, minus points for not enough of him, or other creepy ass boss characters. They could have had more, but it would have completely destroyed what little realism the movie held on to, given that you can't give a live action film character weapons to fight bosses. Cause then it would have turned out like Doom, the movie, which I haven't seen but I've heard was just absurd. That one's also in my queue. For the record, the spelling of the word queue is completely counterintuitive.