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SILENT HILL: The first worthwhile game-to-film adaptation?

The first thing that needs to be said is that I, as a fan of the Silent Hill game series, had great hopes for this film. But I also, NOT as a fan of game-to-film adaptations, had no real expectations for it. After all, there hadn’t been a game adaptation film before it to nail anything that could even be remotely called success. There had been nothing that was both entertaining as well as respectful and decent to its source material - the game from which the film was spawned.

These misfires could be put down to any number of things from bad writing to bad marketing, but when the Silent Hill movie was released, it became very clear what the cause of failure for those previous efforts was. It wasn’t so much down to a lack of marketing finesse or down to a lack of decent writing. It was a lack of passion.

Christophe Gans, the French director, had this passion for the series of Silent Hill and that was made abundantly clear when it was revealed that it was he that had come to Konami to ask for the rights to make the film. It took him five years to finally wrestle them from the company and this, there can be no doubt, was an obvious sign of his love for the project. This was a clear indication that he had nothing but good intentions and that, surely, his personal primary objective was to do right by the source material and make something memorable - the first game-to-film adaptation that gamers would want to actually watch.

The need to bring Silent Hill to the big screen unscathed became paramount for Gans and you can imagine a maternal instinct to protect the franchise was born out of the rights that were granted to him.

And did he manage to drag the franchise through the dirt and mud that is film production to have something that was appealing to an audience unfamiliar with the text and faithful to those that have supported it from the beginning?

What he created was something dark, imposing and unfamiliar. Something that the fans of the games love but people new to the franchise were perhaps not ready for. Why are the walls pulsating? Why are bodies bound to chain link fences by barbed wire and why does that man have a metal triangle on his head? (Of course, the answer is that these things are what makes the game what it is: a hellish head-trip where you are not so much reliant on heavy weaponry to get yourself out to the other side, but the clarity of your mind.) These are questions that, in a majority of cases, only those who have spent the time exploring the world for themselves can answer.

The painstaking care that both Gans and set designer Carol Spier put into creating the environment was monumental and the film’s sets can actually be considered monstrous, dreadful masterpieces, oozing with the love that Gans clearly harbours for Silent Hill. He jettisoned as much CGI as possible and used ballet dancers (utilising their skilled movement techniques to recreate the movements of the monsters) as a majority of the town’s beasts in order to make things seem as real as possible for the viewer.

Unfortunately, the writing does not even come close to being as effective. When it was announced that Roger Avery, the man responsible for helping Quentin Tarantino develop many of his scripts, was going to be heavily influential in the writing of the Silent Hill game-to-film adaptation, many began to salivate at the thought of such a well-respected hired pen taking part in bringing their favourite fictional town to the big screen. But the dialogue somehow seems clunky, rigid and unnatural and I don’t believe that this is something for which the actors (such was their pedigree and experience, although, it has to be said, Sean Bean‘s character has a decidedly dodgy accent) could be blamed. This stiffness was not the only problem with the script; there were also a number of cringe-worthy lines sewn into the normal, Hollywood-friendly format for verbal motifs (“Mother is God in the eyes of a child.” being repeated on a number of occasions between the characters.).

Not a great deal of original music seemed to have been composed for this movie, with many tracks taken directly from the games and inserted into the picture. This is no complaint though as it just serves to act as another aspect of the film that seems warmly familiar to those who have played the game.

To those without the experience of playing the games, I can see the film seeming overly long with several parts at which the film could have easily ended but, as a fan of the games, I was hungry for more. I wanted to see as many of the monsters and demons as I could; I wanted to see as much of the glorious set as I could and I wanted to hear more of the skull-gropingly tense sound effects as I could.

But, by the time that the end credits (following a bloody, hellishly Silent Hillish set-piece) came around, I felt a clear sense of relief; for all of my fears of this film being a disaster had been put to rest. I was happy that the man that had taken charge of the production had loved what he was crafting enough to take every care not to fall into pitfalls occupied by your Uwe Bolls and Paul W. S. Andersons, both being shining examples of directors clearly without the love and care needed to successfully and cleanly amputate a high-quality game from its platform and bring it to the big screen.

Perhaps Gans loved Silent Hill a little bit too much and neglected the duty he had to the average audience and, as a result, left those without prior knowledge of what was in store without much hope of being enticed by it. What is provided to explain why things are happening and why monsters looked like they did is not particularly well-expressed and complicated, but such is the nature of the games which were never particularly clear in their explanations in the first place.