Picture the scenario. Friday night, UGC, oh sorry Cineworld! 15 certificate film. Yeah you guessed it…..utter chaos! You got your seven guys in the front row who have never seen a girl so are giggling uncontrollably whenever girls walk past, girls at the back who scream at every moment (including the Orange ad, which is seriously beginning to irk me) and then your general talkers, munchers, rustlers (not the ranch kind) and such like.
Then there’s me in the midst of it all ready to blow and scream, “Gonna gee it a by!!!” in my best work/ Ayrshire accent.
Then on comes the main feature, the dude in front continues to talk and to also look around him to see if anyone had tuned into his witty reparte instead of watching the movie. I evilly nudged his chair every few minutes for my own amusement….hee hee….
Anyways, Silent Hill. Hmmm, what a movie it is. The story goes that a mother (chick out of Pitch Black) and a father (Sean Bean with a very shakey American accent) have a daughter who sleep walks, and you know, it’s the usual sleep walk scenario….she ends up nearly throwing herself off the side of a cliff on a windy night while shouting, “SILENT HIIILLLLL” repeatedly. Not much explained but enough to keep you interested (although not the guy in front clearly, who is probably comparing it to the game the movie sprung from).
Very quickly we’re into the action of going to SIlent HIll, cause clearly the little girl has some connection to it… Ooo! a forbidden ghost town, one of the most famous in America….Oooooo! Burned down killing bazillions of people!
The run up to Silent Hill is the usual, chick & child are being chased by a cop on a bike (the guys in the front row are clearly here for this as she’s all in extremely tight leather and on a bike) cause the road is closed and nobody should be going anywhere near such a damned place! Car/ bike crash later, we finally see the glory that is SIlent HIll!
The CGI is what hits you immediately. It is bang up to date and utterly mind blowing. The sheer grey scale of the whole landscape is excellent, giving that hollow devoid of colour and life feeling. However, at times you can tell the landscapes were all shot on green screen. Don’t know whether this is to assist the ‘game’ element or not, but it is a little cheesey. But don’t be put off, on the whole the CGI is outstanding…especially when the air raid sirens begin screaming and the screen goes dark….holy crap! is the initial reaction….eep! is the next. After that it is just pretty much carnage and mayhem. DOn’t wanna get into it as it’s best left to the imagination. AFter the third time though you just don’t know if you can handle it again!
The colour contrasts are also excellent. At one point we come back to Sean Bean’s character who decides to chase after his family to SIlent Hill and stops at a gas station with extremely vibrant primary colours. Simple but a great touch. We then return to the lurid grey scale of SIlent Hill itself to find out what’s happening next.
The acting on the whole is very wooden. You kind of get the feeling that the budget was spent on getting the chick from Pitch Black and the CGI. So it was random B movie extras for the other parts. At one point the cop says, “Wow, I think there was a fire here.” (Wow you think? Considering the whole town has burned down and there’s ash continually falling from the sky! thanks for that!)Truly awful.
Don’t really want to give away too much of the story but the other worrying aspect of the whole movie is that Satan appears to be made out to be the good guy and God the bad. Not very cool man, but it’s typical: lots of scripture scrawled everywhere telling of firey damnation for sinners. Repent! Repent! Thanks guys! Us Christians are already shunned but that just helps us along greatly! I suppose the Satanists got the thumbs up for a change. I didn’t feel it was ever a 15 certificate in it’s life, but hey everything’s acceptable now right!?!
The ending is also a bizarre and not very informative. I’m wondering if any gamers out there could enlighten me on it. I have my own theories as to what happened.
I would give it a 3 star rating and recommend it to be seen just for the outstanding CGI.