moriarty6 loved loved loved Silent Hill. He loved Silent Hill the way I loved Underworld: Evolution - that's how much he loved it. This much having been said, I loved Silent Hill only somewhat. It gets an "E" for effort, but maybe a solid "B" for overall quality.

So to start with, it is 100% apparent that the makers of this movie are also fans of the franchise. This is an adaptation that could have been Uwe Boll'd into ruin with almost any other handling; but this is a story of the fan-people, for the fan-people, by the fan-people. The upside of this approach is that if you're as big of a franchise nerd as I am, this movie is a thing of beauty to watch. The downside is that if you're not a franchise nerd, it's not going to make much sense.

[:: only mild spoilers/light discussion to follow ::]

Silent Hill is a horror movie that starts out with one really blindingly good thing going for it - the setting. While in the video game series, the literal/physical town of Silent Hill seems to wander around the country a bit, this movie puts the town in West Virginia. [See the Wikipedia entry for more on this subject]. Ever since a coal seam running beneath the place caught fire in 1974, it's been a ghost town poisoned by ash and toxic fumes - yet inhabited by (a). members of a wacky apocalyptic cult and (b). lotsa monsters. Our protagonist, Rose, has a little girl she adopted as an infant - Sharon - but Sharon is prone to sleepwalking night terrors wherein she repeatedly cries out for Silent Hill. In a vainly misguided attempt to sort out the child's problems, Rose takes Sharon to Silent Hill. Let the bad shit begin.

In both the games and the film, Silent Hill exists on at least two levels - the town itself and "otherworld," a bleak dimension that operates alongside reality, or on top of it, or within it ... but separate from it. Much of the (deliberate and frightening) confusion in-game and on-screen comes from the way characters accidentally switch back and forth between these two coexisting states. Silent Hill, the town - is just an abandoned old mine town. Silent Hill, the otherworld - is a hell dimension, and here there be monsters. The demarcation between the two feels baffling and arbitrary, but there are rules to it; and gradually Rose begins to catch on.

There's definitely an "Alice down the rabbithole" element at work, and Rose's acclimation to the horrors (as she wanders the town searching for her now-missing daughter) mirrors gameplay avatar procedure just fine - except for my one solid gripe in the first hour: Rose doesn't pick up a weapon. She's surrounded by lead pipes, crowbars, baseball bats, and more - but it never once dawns on her that she should nab one of these things and start swinging. It might be silly of me, but as someone who has played and/or observed many video games over the years, it hopped up and down on my nerves that she was wandering this place without even a first-level defensive piece. She didn't need to magically acquire a shotgun or a chainsaw - but a lead pipe? Those evil zombie nurse monsters in the hospital go down with a couple of hits. Come on.

At its core, the movie quite nicely props itself up upon the long-running game themes - primarily (and most effectively) the issue of motherhood/lineage and male sexual aggression as chaos (personified beautifully by "Pyramid-head"). All of the effective characters both good and bad are female - Sharon, the child whose lineage is in question, the outcast Dahlia whose child was taken from her, the cult-leader Christabelle who is "mother" to a flock of believers, and the Cybil - the police officer/authority figure/"heavy" (as she's the only one with a gun) ... whose backstory features only one detail - that she went into SH and rescued a kidnapped boy. The adults are all archetypal authority figures, and the child is the figurative (possibly literal) witch and/or prophet. The only significant masculine presence comes from Pyramidhead - a giant creature with a faceless metal helmet and a really long blade. His motive is never established, and even in the games, he cannot be defeated - only avoided or temporarily pushed back. Pyramidhead isn't (and shouldn't be mistaken for) an avenging God coming to cleanse the unworthy; he's primal aggression without any ambition beyond indulgence.

He functions as a spearhead of the darkness - a harbinger figure who instigates chaos and oozes metaphor. Even in the games he's a sexual threat as well as a physical one; I think it's SH3 where your avatar stumbles upon him raping a nurse-monster. The sexual elements are underscored, even held up and waved as a banner in the movie - where purity and obedience are the cult's rallying cries, and sexual impurity in particular (i.e., Dahlia's refusal to name her daughter's father) is punishable by firey death. The Freudian truncheon is brandished almost to absurdity when Pyramidhead traps Rose and Cybil in an elevator and begins stabbing his really long blade between the elevator doors, trying to run them through.


But I say all that to say this - there's a lot going on in this thing, because it's coming from a very rich and dense storytelling tradition with a mythos that's sprawling and sometimes surreal; but within the confines of its own boundaries it does remain consistent. It's a closed system that functions exquisitely when left to its own devices ... but to viewers who approach the story from outside that closed system - it's probably baffling and dull.

Well, sometimes it is baffling and dull. But I understand the aesthetic choices the director made and I was willing to forgive it some (what I perceived to be) tedious flaws because I realized the necessity of his shortcuts. After all, it was an impossible undertaking - making a movie with a mythos constructed over four extensive, expansive, elaborate games. So in the end, it is a successful fan movie - but it is probably only successful to the diehard fans with enough knowledge of the world to mentally fill in the gaps as they go.

~w_w~

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* By "gone through" I mean "backseat driving." moriarty6 plays through them and I watch with a bottle of wine and my hands over my eyes. In fact, here's an old LJ entry where I talk about SH3. I really find survival horror to be absolutely fascinating, and I've had my eye on this series for years.