Silent Hill quick take, with some spoilers

I liked the feel of the Silent Hill movie a lot. I enjoyed the little details replicated from the game: the horror-writer street names, Midwich Elementary School, etc. The monsters were spot-on, though perhaps a bit more CGI for the nurses might have been in order, to keep them from looking like the dancers that they clearly were. I even liked some of the differences between the game and the film: the way that the peeling paint of Gray Silent Hill flew off the walls to reveal the rusty chain-link fences of Dark Silent Hill, for example. Radha Mitchell and Sean Bean put in adequate performances, and Alice Krige was, well, Alice Krige.

I didn't care for a couple of strange bits, like the way that Silent Hill was clearly the largest city in West Virginia. With its extensive urban center, it looked like a city of half a million, at least. (The largest is the capital, Charleston, at about 50,000.) Also, it didn't seem as though anyone had an accent.

What I really disliked, though, was the pacing. While the slow discovery of Silent Hill's strangeness worked well at the beginning, some of the slower bits in the latter half of the film were simply boring. The film was just too long (I am actually considering trying my hand at editing out about 20-30 minutes once the DVD comes out).

I also was very impatient with the burst of exposition at the end of the film: the door opens, the screen turns to white, and we're suddenly getting the entire backstory all shoved down our throats all at once. I would have preferred, for example, to see something that made the janitor's bathroom-stall-barbed-wire fate a little more explicable in advance -- perhaps a cryptic note written in blood, or something about his killing that would have pointed to revenge as the reason. Even a remark from one of the people in the church might have helped. As it was, the janitor's body was just another haunted-house fright moment with no particular explanation -- which would have been fine, too -- until getting hit with the big message at the end.

I'd say that folks who like the game will like the movie. Folks who know nothing about the game might sorta like the movie. Extremely demanding viewers will probably hate it.