Back a few weeks ago when life was too busy for blogging, the horror movie Silent Hill came to the top of my Netflix queue. Until recently, it had been our habit to let Tadpole 2 fall asleep in my lap after bath time. This was guaranteed quiet TV time, as she usually fell asleep within 15 minutes. Consquently, over the course of a couple nights I was able to watch the movie.
Silent Hill shares a pedigree with a growing collection of movies such as Resident Evil and Hitman, that is, it began as a video game. Like Resident Evil, Silent Hill is a horror game/movie. Unlike RE, Silent Hill is less about kicking monster rear-end and more about solving a creepy, dangerous haunting. I’ve never played the video game, so I watched the movie unfettered by preconceptions.
The premise of the movie is that a couple’s adopted child has increasingly dangerous sleepwalking events in which she claims to be trying to get back to Silent Hill. The adoptive mother researches Silent Hill’s location and decides to take her there. Mother and daughter end up in a ghost town abandoned a generation earlier. Apparently a coal mine under the city had ignited, sending poisonous gasses and ash in a cloud over the city. The coal continues to smolder to this day, thus the town is fenced off and ostensibly abandoned.
I mentioned that I watched this movie over the course of a few days. In a strange case of serendipity, I read this fascinating entry on io9 titled Underground Fires Burn for Decades. Apparently the premise behind Silent Hill (well, to be more precise, the premise behind the town’s abandonment) isn’t that far fetched.
In the movie, the town itself is a character. In fact, it’s probably the most interesting character in the movie. The cinematography and effects were well balanced to create a lonely, spooky, haunted town. The locations, the clouds of ash, the haunted visions–they all struck a chord unmatched by the protagonists. This, unfortunately, is where the movie failed. The adpotive mother was an idiot, which I attribute to lazy writing on the part of the screenwriters. Because this was a very scene-driven movie, the screenwriters moved the protagonist from location to location with little regard for what a sane person would do under similar circumstances. I’ve seen the same thing in RPG writing, and I’m probably guilty of it myself. When the writer is focused so strongly on the destination, sometimes they’ll take any available road, no matter how implausible, to get there.
Overall, I liked the movie more than it probably deserved. I give it a 3.5 out of 5. It was sufficiently creepy and the setting was top notch, even if the protagonist left something to be desired and it left a few mysteries dangling.
That movie sucked. We saw it in the theater down there, and I have to say that it was one of the absolute worst movies that I’ve ever subjected myself to. It had the stupidest protagonist, the stupidest visual effects, and the worst acting since Anna Nicole Smith kicked the bucket.
Even the soundtrack annoyed me.
Don’t hold back. Tell me what you really think!
I probably wouldn’t have been very happy about paying full price for it, so I’m coming at it from a different perspective. I read the reviews knocking it when it was in theaters, so I didn’t have high expectations. I thought the ash and the sirens were way creepy, as were the interiors of the buildings. I can’t particularly remember the soundtrack, but I vaguely remember thinking that it had a game soundtrack vibe to it.
The best parts of the movie were when nobody was talking. I stand by my original statement that the protagonists, especially the mother, were idiots.
Hey, you wanted a rebuttal, buddy.
I even saw it on a matinee and still wanted my money back.
The best part of the movie was the fact the theater started doing fountain Coke Zeros at the concession stand at that point. That, and the previews.
It was the cinematic equivalent of toilet paper: it stinks after usage. Therefore, it’s best to flush it and forget it. If it reappears, it’s only going to be worse.