'Silent Hill'

Every time a movie based off a game is announced, I have a strange, morbid curiosity to watch. Something that nears the sick, I would say. It's the same curiosity that is in us all, when we see a car crash by the side of the road and are compelled to slow down and absorb in all details of the scene, no matter how horrifying they are. This is me, when a movie based off a game - especially, a game I like - is announced.

I had seen a lot of game-inspired and game-based bullshit in the last few years before 2006. Resident Evil burst its ugly face through the big screen in 2002. As a big fan of Code Veronica, I sorta hoped the movie could be saved by borrowing from it, but... as it turns out, it tried to follow the original games, only without most of the things we liked about them, including Jill Valentine on a lead role. In 2003, it was House of the Dead, whose director oughta be hung upside-down and beaten blue with plastic mallets by creepy clowns. Another instance of Resident Evil came out the following year, and just before the one we care about for this review, in 2005, we had Doom and the most horrible of the lot: Alone in the Dark. Don't believe me? The producer and director is Uwe Boll, who is known for horribly mauling motion pictures. Including BloodRayne (2005), Postal (2007) and the aforementioned House of the Dead.

And so, crow help us, we reach 2006 and Silent Hill's own moment of damnation and disgrace on being adapted to the big screen. Or rather, 2007: we in Portugal waited exactly one fuckin' year for the movie's release on national territory. The first thing I recall doing is checking for whose names were involved. Because if Uwe Boll had been within ten miles of it, I would be going postal myself. Writer Roger Avary had previously worked in Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, though, and director Christophe Gans took care of one strange movie I actually liked watching, Le Pacte des Loups. I thinks to myself that this may not be as bad as it first looked. Not wanting to wait a year to watch it, I actually took to the Internet, and a good friend of mine managed to find me a copy before it hit theaters.

(Let me sneak in this: the picture I posted isn't the real poster for Silent Hill, this is. I hate it. It was most voted on an Internet poll and that's how it came to be the official poster. Of all the good stuff they could've added to a movie poster about this, they picked that piece of crow. Go figure.)

The plotline of the movie follows the original Silent Hill game. Rose da Silva (which would be the female equivalent to the game's Harry Mason) is a woman whose adoptive daughter Sharon (in the game, Cheryl) is having nightmares and begs to be taken to the abandoned resort town of Silent Hill. Desperate for help, Rose promptly drives her daughter to town, only to have her vanish after a car crash on the outskirts of the town. When Rose wakes up, though, the town is packed with monsters and creatures. In order to find her daughter, Rose must now solve the untold story of the town. And as of this paragraph, those who are still waiting to give it a look should be warned of incoming SPOILERS to it.

First and foremost, my favorite part of the film happens within the first 20 minutes. Let me show you exactly why. Check out this helpful piece I found in YouTube.



... see what I mean? The intro scene is reproduced almost to perfection, like the first-person shooter scene in Doom. From here on, however, we're gonna have a few problems with keeping up with the game. Gans started well, but he didn't keep it up. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't looking for a complete live-action version of the game. But frankly, there are a few pointers on the plotline that were changed, possibly to provide a better understanding of the whole story of the town (which would only become clear towards the third game of the franchise) and also to cater to more sensible audiences but... I don't think they are such good changes, and most of them have only made the story more complicated than it needed to be for the non-gamers.

For starters, the whole idea of a cult to a local God disappeared. Whatever is wrong in the town of Silent Hill happened because a local cult was trying to give their God a physical form. The leader of the cult, Dahlia Gillespie, offered her own daughter Alessa to be a host who would birth the God. The preparations for the birthing involved scorching the girl alive so that she would know pain and suffering. The more pain she met, the more powerful the God's physical form would be. In the movie, Dahlia Gillespie is not the leader of the cult: her sister, Christabella, is. I don't know why this was done; possibly the fact they thought it too shocking for a mother to burn her own daughter alive, or an attempt to make a reference to the name Christabella, which only appears on the comic book Silent Hill: Dying Inside. Whatever it was, it shifted the focus from the parallel made in the game: Dahlia the parent who mistreats her child, and Harry (or Rose) the parent who goes to great lenghts to save his child. It also defeated the purpose of the cult itself: in the movie, they don't care for a local God. They burn Alessa because they think she's a witch. So I'll risk saying it's a plain Dark Ages version of the Catholic church.

Like in the game, it is hinted that Alessa has a special feat of her own. ESP maybe, like it was hinted in Silent Hill: 0rigins. That power, heightened by the dormant God inside her, created the alternative town. When her power was completely unleashed, the dark version was created. In the movie, however, the God comes to Alessa after she's been burned, for no apparent reason. Now it may just be me, but I think this is overcomplicating the plot, and leaving no explanation as to why the local God came for Alessa.

Another issue that was in great discussion in forums about the movie was the presence of Pyramid Head, by far the most treasured monster of the franchise. In the second game, Pyramid Head came to punish James Sunderland for the murder of his wife, which he had repressed until he came to town. The monsters only exists in relation to Sunderland, and once Sunderland accepts what he's done, Pyramid Head ceases to have a point and disappears. If there's no James Sunderland in the movie and, as we've seen, this follows the story of the first game, why did they put him in there?

Well, because he is by far the most treasured monsters of the franchise. Fans expected to see a cameo of him somewhere, like they expected to see monsters they'd recognize from the game: Lying Figure / Straightjacket makes a cameo, the Nurses are classical and common to all games but the fourth, the bugs were also popular for the first two games, Grey Children... they did manage to make his presence logical, though. He is punishing the people locked inside alternative Silent Hill, and trying to make them accept they have scorched an innocent child. For as long as they deny it, he will chase after them. So his presence isn't all that farfetched. And I don't think, as was discussed in several forums, his presence is tied in with the bugs. In the movie, we see Pyramid Head first emerging from a swarm of insects, dragging a recently dead figure whose symbolism is lost (all of Pyramid Head's deaths are symbolic for Sunderland in the game). But that doesn't mean he control them, or that he only shows up when they do...

Either if you have played the games or not, you will love two things about this movie: soundrack and sound in general (except for Johnny Cash' Ring of Fire, everything was taken directly from the games, including the mechanical sounds you hear in dark Silent Hill, a trademark of the franchise) and special effects. This is why I was happy Gans was directing the movie: he doesn't rely too much on CGI. Of course the bugs are made via computer, the final scene of the movie featuring Alessa / God is mostly CGI, as is the scenery of dark Silent Hill, there weren't a lot of ways around that. However, the rest of the monsters are actors in costume. Pyramid Head, Janitor and Straightjacket included. I particularly liked the nurse scene: Rose comes across a corridor that is blocked out by some twenty nurses. As is demonstrated, monsters in Silent Hill react to the light, so Rose does what many of us have tried to do during the games: try to Solid Snake her way past the nurses. I like the fact Gans didn't cheap out on the scene by placing four or five real nurses, and multiplying them via computer. All nurses were real actresses, and did a wonderful job at playing monster nurse, I might add.

Finally, I also would like to address the cryptic ending of the movie, in which Rose and Sharon return home, but are nowhere to be found by Rose's husband... who happens to be sitting right next to them on the couch. Technically, the God took a hold of Sharon after the massacre, so Rose and Sharon got locked inside alternative Silent Hill forever. I find the explanation provided by getting the Bad ending in the first game much more reliable, seeing as they managed to leave the town. In this ending, the whole game was a pre-death hallucination: Harry Mason died in the crash at the beginning of the game, much like what happens in the movie Jacob's Ladder (1991). Rose and Sharon also died in the crash. Only their spirits have returned home, and of course, Rose's husband can't find them.

Overall, Gans made a good job on the conversion, even with all the plot changes, it's a movie gamers can be proud of and one of the best adaptations out there. And if you don't know the franchise, you are likely to enjoy the movie even more than someone who does. It's worth a view either way, so if you're not willing to rent or download, do a search for it on YouTube, in high definition, sit back with a bag of chips and enjoy yourself.