dir: Christophe Gans
[img_assist|nid=864|title=You're not welcome, run away, run out of the theatre now!|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=375|height=300]
There really isn’t any logic to the way producers think making a film out of a computer game will work at the box office. Sure, it’ll get them extra money, but rarely does it result in anything worth watching in any state apart from being drunk. From Super Mario Brothers onwards, the vast majority of computer games transferred to the silver screen have stunk like a crate full of decaying skunks.
Look at the illustrious list of movies that have undergone this transformation from nerd property to mass entertainment: Doom, Resident Evil, House of the Dead, Bloodrayne, Alone in the Dark, Wing Commander, Mortal Kombat, Streetfighter, Tomb Raider 1 & 2. Were any of these films watchable in any state apart from being drunk? And would humanity be any worse off if these films were never made and the actors and directors responsible for them were banished to a lower level of hell?
The reason they keep doing it, and there are slated to be around 50 more adaptations over the next few years, is because of the name recognition value. In the same way that marketers think attaching the name of a celebrity to a perfume means the perfume will sell, without even bothering with the pretence that the celebrity had anything to do with the mortar and pestling of the final concoction, they assume the name of the game alone will get the faithful to pack in the cinema in their unsightly multitudes.
It doesn’t really make sense. Someone whose played and loved a game doesn’t necessarily want to watch a film about it. The film lacks the essential component which makes the game more entertaining than say, your average book or movie version of a story: interactivity. Passively sitting back and watching characters on screen replicate events from a game you’ve played would have to scale the heights of tedium. Or at the very least be very frustrating.
Silent Hill is a Japanese game franchise that started life on the Playstation. It has spawned multiple sequels and imitators, and earned its place high atop the genre of gaming known as survival horror. The film cribs elements from three or more of the games and blends them into a generic but curiously nonsensical melange. Even for something based on a game, this flick is insulting and incomprehensible.
Rose (Radha Mitchell) has an adopted daughter called Sharon (Jodelle Ferland). Sharon looks like the generic Creepy Little Girl made popular in recent remakes of Japanese horror films. Sharon has taking to sleepwalking her way onto cliffs and screaming about a place called Silent Hill.
In an example of great parenting skills, Rose decides, against her useless husband’s protestations, to travel to the deserted ghost town in order to find out why Sharon acts so loopily.
They journey to West Virginia. A leather clad policewoman, Cybil (Laurie Holden) chases them down the road for no good reason, and all three of them seem to cross some mystical barrier into a greyed out, misty world.
Silent Hill is shrouded perpetually in mist, except when it isn’t, for reasons I neither understand nor want to. Sharon disappears, thus compelling her annoying mother Rose to run around the town screaming “Sharon? Sharon?” with annoying regularity.
Apart from screaming ‘Sharon?’, she also repeats the line “I have to find my daughter” so frequently that I wanted her and her daughter to be killed, and soon.
Apart from the perpetual smoke machine, other strange things seem to be going on in this odd town. Every so often an alarm like an air raid siren goes off heralding a change in this world. Everything gets uglier, satanic beetles appear and this strange muscly freak with a metal pyramid on his head stomps around trying to kill things.
Rose, who has been chasing something that looks like her little girl by following conveniently left clues that lead her from point A to point B to point Boredom, doesn’t seem to understand that nothing in this realm makes any sense. Despite all the crazy and kooky stuff she sees, it doesn’t seem to sink in that she’s in a horror film, or at least within some kind of construct that shouldn’t exist. She seems to blithely accept the nonsense around her whilst muttering about Sharon under her breath like a homeless crazy person.
There’s witchhunter religious zealots itching to burn people, there’s Rose's husband stumbling around to allow for plot exposition about backstory, and characters doing stuff that doesn’t mean anything, all wrapped up in a package designed to prevent you from being able to think about any of it logically. You can’t plothole a film like this: since it can do whatever whenever it feels like, saying “But how did this…” or “why the hell didn’t…” just doesn’t cut it. If you think in terms of searching for a plot or a setting that makes sense, you are lost.
The most fascinating aspect for me has nothing to do with the story, the game, or any of the crap acting in the flick. The director Christophe Gans, famous for the cult hit Brotherhood of the Wolf (Le pact des loups), changed the way the town of Silent Hill was represented from the games. In the film, Silent Hill is a ghost town abandoned since the 70s because of an underground coal fire that burns still.
Gans took his inspiration for that scenario from an actual town called Centralia, in Pennsylvania, which has been mostly abandoned, and has an underground coal fire that has been burning since the 1960s. There is enough coal under the town for the fire to keep burning for 250 years, and there are no plans to extinguish it. See, that little bit of trivia is more interesting to me than almost anything that actually occurs in this flick.
Don’t get me wrong, visually the film is quite impressive. As you would expect from a film, I guess. If a film can’t be visually impressive, and it doesn’t have a decent script or acting to fall back on, then it doesn’t really need to be a film; it’s better off as a play or as a short story scrawled drunkenly on napkins after drinking five too many drinks down at the local pub.
Silent Hill's strength is clearly and solely visual. It is hard to say whether the makers achieve their goal from a storytelling point of view, however, because I don’t have access to the drugs they were using when they thought any of this made sense. The premise alone isn’t that strange for a horror film, especially for one based on a computer game, but it doesn’t really cohere in any way which could lead to an audience unfamiliar with the games caring about anything that happens.
I understand what goes on this film, as far as anyone can understand nonsensical plotting. Thanks to the magic of the internet, I’m not at a complete loss now, at least not as much when I watched the flick. The ending, still, makes no sense at all, even with all the information provided. Sure, there’s an explanation for what goes on, but none of it could possibly mean anything to the average filmgoer, whether they’ve played these games or not. I challenge anyone who thinks that ending is meaningful to prove it using twenty five words or less in a human language.
This film should be recommended to people you don’t like. Think of it as a potential Christmas gift that will keep on giving those people you buy it for headaches long after the Christmas turkey has been digested and shat out.
Other than that, do not waste your time.
4 out of 10
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“You burned in the fire that you started and nothing can save you because you're already damned!” – quality dialogue, Silent Hill.
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