So, Josh had me go see “Silent Hill” with him today, a movie based on a popular video game series that first premiered in 1999. If you click through to the Wikipedia description, and go through the various links to each game, you’ll see that some games follow one plot line, and others go in different directions. You’ll also find that each game has a variety of endings…
…such is this movie (i.e. a bunch of parts thrown together). It starts out with a mother, Rose, who finds that her daughter is having nightmares about some place called Silent Hill… She does Google searches to find this place, seeing that it’s a ghost town in West Virginia. Therefore, as any smart mother does (insert sarcasm here…), she decides to take her daughter there… After Rose wrecks the car on the way there, she wakes up to find her daughter missing and ashes falling. After this point, Rose slowly descends into the mystery surrounding Silent Hill and, consequently, hell…
The effects, overall, are pretty good and the story relatively captivating…but only because you think “what the hell?!” throughout and hope that it gets figured out in the end…and while many parts do get resolved, it still leaves you wanting…something… More information? Resolution? A big “hey! You’ve been ‘had’!” from the filmmakers? Who knows…
Regardless, as a scary movie, it doesn’t do so well…at least, I wasn’t scared…although the gory parts made me wriggle in my seat a bit… There weren’t any “jumpy” parts, at least. And while it was an interesting story, unfortunately, it just didn’t make much sense…
…and if you look through the video game information on Wikipedia, you’ll likely see why… It seems that the movie tried taking parts out of each game, and incorporated those elements/scenes effectively (and a few reviewers who have played the game think that the movie evokes the emotion that the game does really well)…but something got lost in translation. I just would have liked to see something a bit more…cohesive…I guess…
Yeah, I guess I’m not really recommending this… It was okay if you like video games and if you liked the series, but as someone who’s never played the game(s), it just didn’t make much sense… I’d wait for the rental…