Reviewed by Alicia Glass
Studio: Sony Pictures
MPAA Rating: R
Director: Christophe Gans
Review Rating: 8
Based on the wildly popular video game, a woman goes looking for her beloved adopted daughter in the haunted town of Silent Hill.
I didn’t play the game, I did watch the husband play it, and was intrigued by the ending. So when the movie came out awhile later, many of the fans of the video game were displeased, and the movie sadly didn’t seem to generate a lot in the way of new fans of just the film. Well poo on that; I enjoyed the movie just fine, thank you. Radha Mitchell did just fine in the main role of Rose, hunting mother, though I do still think that part was a tad too generic and could have been handed to any number of actresses. Sean Bean is Chris, her husband, remember him? Poor guy. Jodelle Ferland gives a phenomenal performance as both Sharon, and Alessa. Which brings us to the rest of the movie.
So Rose and Chris adopted this girl Sharon, and she just happens to have night fits about some town called Silent Hill. And Rose, being a caring mother, decides to take Sharon back to the old burned town of what was Silent Hill, to try and help her daughter. Once there, literally all hell breaks loose, and Rose finds herself battling psycho mutant nurses with no eyes, or Pyramidhead with his maul. A good deal of the movie is video game combat, but they try to bring back the story heavily towards the end, for the climactic scene where Alessa comes in her full dark vengeance and explains everything while she calmly rips people apart. It’s hard to guess which is more terrifying, the calm little girl with the black eyes who’s killing folk all around her with flailing barbed wire, or the circumstances and townsfolk who did this to her in the first place. Although that’s not entirely fair, Alessa made a deal with…Someone, and chose to become this dark revenging angel on the entire town. But then, according to the movie anyway, they deserved it.
Silent Hill takes what most people thought impossible, that is a horror/action video game, and made it into a really believable if not understandable movie. And hell, for Halloween even your significant other can be talked into watching Silent Hill with you!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5mT5LhbRJw]