The Bottom Line

Are you tired of movie adaptation of video games letting you down? I suppose if one takes a look back at movies such as Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, and Doom, there is reason to be worried. The reason, however, from a gamer's perspective, is not because the movies were terrible; it was because the movie's tended to stray from the video games too much for comfort. Silent Hill, the movie based on the hits Playstation game is not exactly a blockbuster, but at the very least it satisfies the gaming community.

On a related note, the third AT Wire column featured my opinion on the Doom movie. The movie wasn't exactly a hit and, to be honest, nobody expected it to be. One argument that I made in favor of Doom was that it satisfied gamers more than other video games turned into movies. The key word in that last sentence was "more." Doom didn't hold true to the original video game's plot as well as Silent Hill, but that may have been a problem with the fact that the plot for the original game wasn't developed and deep. Here is the point: Silent Hill seems to deliver the most accurate retelling of a video game's story in the history of the genre!

If you haven't seen the trailers yet, the story basically revolves around a small town somewhere in West Virginia. The town was evacuated due to coal fires that burned deep below the surface. Rose Da Silva, the mother and main character, and her husband, Chris, played by Sean Bean, adopted their daughter, Sharon, whose past is unclear at first. All we know about Sharon is that she has dreams in which she mutters the words, "Silent Hill." Rose decides that she must take her daughter to Silent Hill in the hopes of curing her. Since this isn't exactly a movie review, my plot description ends here.

Unfortunately, despite being an enthusiastic fan of Resident Evil, my involvement with the Silent Hill series is less than adequate. I have only seen and played bits of the original Playstation game myself and must confess that I had to do some research before I went to see the movie. It was after doing a little research that I stumbled upon a few differences between the movie and the game. For example, in the movie, Rose is the one lost in Silent Hill, whereas in the game, it is the father (Christopher in the movie and Harry in the game), who ends up lost in Silent Hill. Besides a few name changes among the characters and minor deviations in plot, the movie represents the game accurately. In fact, one of my only grievances was the lack of an alternate "UFO" ending.

Many reviews have already been written on the Internet regarding the poor quality of this film. I find it to be no surprise that a majority of the critics with this opinion have never even heard of the video games. To the movie's credit, even the critics who hated the movie's plot ended up praising it for its artistic feel. Despite Roger Ebert's low review of one and a half stars out of five, he wrote in his review that, "it's an incredibly good-looking film." So the movie's artistic appeal earned it at least a portion of those one and a half stars. That is more than can be said about Ultraviolet, a movie that couldn't be salvaged by the artistic styles of Picasso, Da Vinci, and Monet all put together.

Silent Hill should have no problem satisfying fans, entertaining gamers, and, like an accurate movie adaptation of a video game, leaving the rest of the audience screaming, "WTF!" GG.

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