| Danch | 04-22-2006 12:02 AM |
Saw Silent Hill tonight:: my copy/paste from those too lazy to read my review in the movies area.
*spoilers*
Ahh, the video game movies. Such a curse. This is not just a Uwe Boll film, Mario, Mortal Kombat, Wing Commander, Bloodrayne and many other game to film have gone terribly wrong. Did Silent Hill overcome this trend? Depends on your point of view.
To start with, fans of the game will appreciate this movie much more. Not just typical fans of gaming or Silent Hill, but the bread and butter hardcore. I was able to recgonize the opening sequence, the real opening sequence with the babies, the bowling alley and the blackout, the same way that Silent Hill 1 started. The hospital map of Silent Hill 2, and even how Pyramid's arms are backwards and the sword grinding from the first encounter of Pyramid head. The camera angles, even caught that from the throwbacks to early survival horror games. But even I as a movie, gaming and serious Silent Hill fan found serious errors with this film.
For a great thriller/freaky film there is a good need of smart dialogue and clever characters. The only character I could look into was the mother. The cop, Christopher and pretty much everyone else had bad dialogue and simply bad character decisions. Skip to scene where Rose is about to meet 'the Devil' and Queen Borg finds the picture of the girl. Why on earth would anyone with brains decide to take a shot which you know full well there is nothing in the chamber? Why not try to make a mistake? She is not the only one either. Did Sean Bean really do anything for this film? More then anything the film pace was slowed with his scenes. At the very least it's a great build for Silent Hill 2 if Bean/everyone else decides to do one.
Moving on, some of the best effects I found was the production values of this film. The town, hell, the hospital, the bathroom was just amazing. Everything had that dead/alive feel to it. The transformation of the town was just top notch.
There were scenes that had to make or break Silent Hill and all in all, exceeded my expectations. Pyramid Head fired on all cylinders, every scene with that guy was just perfect, musical score and all. Everything just felt so damn alive, it was great.
The music was also superb. I know that Jeff Danna & Akira Yamaoka did the music and these fine fellows did music for the Silent Hill games. Perfect job setting the mood for what music should be like in a survival movie.
Because it's rather late and I'm exhausted, I shall touch on one last point: Pyramid head. He fucking ROCKED in Silent Hill 2, and that translated over to the movie. Those cockroaches with him seemed a little odd in the inital scene, but that's forgiveable. The best easily is how without mercy, Pyramid grabbed Anne's clothes, ripped them off and proceeded to grab the heart area of poor Anne. Without hesitation Pyramid ripped that bitch's skin right off, like a kid ripping a popsicle wrapper right off in a hot July afternoon. But wait, he then *throws* the skin and intestines it looked like at Rose and Bull-Dyke, classic I say. Shame there wasen't a front camera for that shot, Silent Hill 2 style instead of a behind the shoulder.
All in all one of the best (if not the) video game to movie's done. Somewhere Uwe Boll is unemployed.
6.8/10. | 