Day 25: Silent Hill

Silent Hill (2006)

If you know me, you know there's a list of certain actors I'll watch whatever they're in. Sean Bean is on that list.

Plus, it's Silent Hill.  There's no way in hell the movie could measure up to the games.  Not for plot, or characters, or the atmosphere.  It can take a gamer hours--days or weeks if they do side missions-- to get through the convoluted and regularly bizarre story of the games, and they do so as the main character.  They are the main character.

In a film, you follow the main character.  Some perceptions of the main character, and the monsters, is immutable.  There's a loss of control.

So, of course, gamers are going to complain.  The film can never be as creepy as the game, and it doesn't try.  It's an episode of the world, an alternate universe just recogniseable enough that people who know what details to look for can appreciate it, but the game-innocent isn't lost or bored.

Silent Hill, the world, is beautiful.  Terrible and beautiful.  It's the dark side of the magic Disney uses to lure in people and feed their imaginations.    There is the physical, and there is the emotional connection to it.  Everything has meaning.

Without knowledge of the games, it's easy to miss the meaning, to mark Pyramid Head as just another bizarre Hell creature and call it a day.  To try and intentionally forget him.  (Good luck.)

Gamers seeking a live action version of the mannequin screwing (I mean that literally) Pyramid Head of the second game hate that he's not the same avatar of rage and destruction, that their longer glimpse of him is somehow more human than the graphics and game designers of 2001 made him.

I love this movie.  I always will.  It finds that magic button in my mind and turns on my imagination.  The games do that too, but this has its own magic.  Hate it for not being pure, or being too weird to be mainstream.

But love it for being something different.  Something terrible and beautiful. Plus, there's Sean Bean, and he doesn't die.  That almost never happens.


Would you watch it again? Yes.
Would you own it? Already do.