Silent Hill

Where do these video game adaptations keep going wrong? It seems like moving from an action-oriented video game into an action film should be an easy transition - fill in some of the narrative and logical gaps, make the characters a bit more compelling and you're ready to go. Frequently, the video games are already based on old movies to begin with, making the change-over even more intuitive. How could Jan de Bont possibly fuck up Tomb Raider, in other words, when the original game was just a rip-off of Indiana Jones?

As with theatrical adaptations, movies inspired by video games retain too much of the imprint of their former medium to work successfully as films. Whether it's out of respect to the fans of the source material or just a lack of imagination I'm not sure, but filmmakers tend to simply replicate the events of the game in movie form. How is remaking a video game but removing the defining aspect of gameplay - interactivity - supposed to enhance the experience?

Eventually, I'm quite certain someone will come along and direct the hell out of a video game adaptation, producing a movie that's satisfying completely on its own merits. For about the first ten minutes of Silent Hill, it feels like Christophe Gans might be the first director to cross the invisible barrier between redoing games as movies and genuine filmmaking. But then, just like the titular town, everything goes straight to hell.



Gans introduces the viewer to the eerie ghost town of Silent Hill in a beautifully rendered, nearly silent sequence. For maybe the first time, a game environment is rendered on the screen cinematically, in this case an ashen gray dystopia that appears to have once been a small, quiet town. Better yet, Gans focuses on these early, haunting sequences solely on developing an unsettling, otherworldly atmosphere. There are no big scare moments, no sudden revelations and no pointless, expository introductions. Just a desperate woman wandering around some lonely ruins looking for a girl who has suddenly vanished.

Rose Da Silva (Radha Mitchell) has come to abandoned, hidden Silent Hill to cure her adopted daughter of night terrors. Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) screams in her sleep about the place, clearly the site of some horrifying past tragedy. Unfortunately, moments after arriving in Silent Hill, Rose loses Sharon in the murky fog. The, the demons appear.

Once it transforms from a creepy psychological thriller into a monster movie, Silent Hill can't help but lose some of its air of trippy mystery. After all, an abandoned town where peculiar, inexplicable things happen is always going to be more scary than an abandoned town filled with standard movie monsters. But as if the transition into a more conventional type of storytelling weren't painful enough, Gans and screenwriter Roger Avary essentially give up on even trying to make the story of Silent Hill work as a movie. We get monsters, Rose starts to run away, she meets up with a few other characters, and the rest of the film alternates side-scrolling action sequences with scenes directly lifted from the video game's interstitial exposition.

It comes to feel very much like watching your friend play the game "Silent Hill," but not playing yourself because you only have one controller.



How pointless and lazy is the bulk of Silent Hill? There are several scenes featuring characters looking at maps, laying out their planned routes, which are then superimposed on the screen as in a player's guide. More than one sequence finds Rose jumping between platforms while other characters yell directions at her. "Up! Right! Okay now go forward! Stop! Left right left right a b a b start!"

I have never played the game, so I'm not 100% sure what ws changed and what was kept, but I will say that the actual storyline behind the game isn't really that interesting. As a setting, the town works terrifically on screen. Cinematographer Dan Laustsen (who previously shot Gans' great-looking-but-lame Brotherhood of the Wolf) bathes the town in glassy milk-white during the "daytime" scenes and a sickly yellow-black during the dark times, when the demons appear.

But as a narrative, there's just not enough going on to make Rose's journey compelling. We find out some secrets about Sharon's background and about the Wicker Man-esque cult that operates out of the town's crumbling church, but Avary brings none of the innovative and disturbing style than Gans gives the visuals to his screenplay. Even Sean Bean, playing Sharon's adopted father, can't manage to inject any life into this turgid mess. (If the movies follow the story of the games, his character will dominate the potential sequel, but he's given almost othing to do this time around.)

Essentially, filmmakers adapting video games are given a choice. Either film the actions of the game's playable characters in as straightforward a manner as possible or change the game fundamentally to work as a movie while keeping the defining essentials intact. Hollywood seems to be working from the assumption than video game fans want the former - they don't want to go see a movie that's loosely based on a game they have played, but a film that's recognizably a direct port of the game, allowing them to relive the play experience without moving or concentrating.

Perhaps this really is what fans want to see. I know a lot of people claim to enjoy Doom, which I found absolutely unbearable and pointless as a movie. (Also as a game, but that's an argument for a different post). I think fans like these movies because they are already fans, because it's a property in which they have developed a keen interest and no one is giving them the option of seeing the worlds of these games really exploded on to the big screen properly. Just once, it would be nice to get a real filmmaker to tackle one of these games and see if it can't work as something more than a non-interactive gaming simulation.