We are lucky

[Babymordred121]

I'm kind of a middle-grounder. I loved the monster designs and the encounter with the nurses. I also really liked the deranged Anna character. She kind of reminded me of the Stranger from 30 Days of Night.

However, I did find that the movie had some problems that pulled me out of enjoying it. Radha Mitchell's acting was quite high on the list. All of her lines are delivered without any believable emotion, and her acting is flat and underplayed. For example, when Pyramid Head is ripping off a young woman's skin, her reacted was at about the same energy level as it might have been if she'd just noticed that a dude with a nose-bleed had left a stain on the arm of her couch.

On the other hand, I enjoyed all of Sean Bean's sections of the film immensely. There were points in the conversations with the policeman that seemed unnecessary, though. The whole "Devil's Justice" monologue didn't really seem to have any bearing on the situation of Christopher finding his wife and daughter. I half expected Christopher to respond with "How many hours a day do you spend practicing that speech in the mirror?"

Also, I hated the huge vision/info-dump they threw in once Rose had finally reached Alessa's hospital chamber. It was completely unnecessary, as every character had already described in depth everything that had happened to Alessa. As it was, it felt like the director considered us all retarded children, and that he had to lead us by the hand through every nook and cranny of the plot. Literally any other method of exposition would have been better. Better yet, just have her walk into the room and immediately begin the conversation with Dark Alessa. That way, it would have left at least a hint of moral ambiguity, as we would have to trust the word of the psychopathic monster in order to justify its own actions.

One thing that strikes me as just plain odd about the film is how it handled the Order. I'd never played a Silent Hill game before I'd watched the movie, so at the time the crazy religious zealots in the film just seemed like your average, run of the mill Puritans. Fine, fine; it makes sense in the context of the film. However, now that I've gotten to know the games a lot better, there really isn't any comparison between which version of the Order is the more interesting bunch. While it might have been a little more exotic, I don't think it would have been that much more difficult to pull off, if they'd bothered to give the Order a bit more back story. They could have used the screen time they instead decided to throw away on the redundant, condescending flash-back.

All in all, it was quite an enjoyable film to watch and it did have a very effective, "Silent Hill" atmosphere. All the set designs were GORGEOUS. The places where it failed didn't necessarily have to do with it being a bad adaptation of the Silent Hill games as much as being a poorly paced and executed film in general.

[DistantJ]

I always thought that the cult in the movie were far more interesting and believable myself... There's something so much more frightening to me about the kind of obsessive fundamentalists which you get in real life, and it doesn't seem so farfetched to think that some of them would even take to burning people if their faith taught them to.

Being that most people who haven't played the games complain that the movie is confusing, I don't think removing Dark Alessa's 'info dump' would have been the best idea!!

As for how well executed the film was - consider that it's a mainstream horror movie and it's amazingly done. Horror movies are rarely this deep, this well acted and scripted and this clever. Even the acclaimed horror classics (Halloween etc.) are mostly pretty hammy when looked at as film in general (bar one or two, say The Exorcist for example), but this one can stand up pretty well outside of the genre.