By Justin Kroll
For The State News
When first playing the video game "Silent Hill" in ninth grade, the one thing I remember about it is being scared out of my mind. The bone-chilling music, the creepy setting and the occasional demon that would pop out and send me running out of the room made it terrifying to play.
With the new film adaptation, you would assume the first goal the producers would want to accomplish is making sure the film is just as scary as the game, but it seems they forgot to keep that in mind while making the film.
In this adaptation, Rose Da Silva (Radha Mitchell) fears her daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) might harm herself because of nightmares that cause her to constantly sleepwalk.
She decides to take Sharon to Silent Hill, the place in Sharon's nightmares, which is a town that has been abandoned because of underground fires that killed half the population in the '70s.
On the way there, Rose crashes her car. While she is unconscious, Sharon goes missing. Rose then realizes she has reached Silent Hill, which is covered by a fog of ash and dust. The buildings are abandoned and broken down and a siren goes off every so often that is followed by a sudden darkness covering the town.
Rose finds out that during this time of darkness, the town turns into its own personal hell. The buildings break down and an array of creatures appear that can only be described as a cross between the demons from "Constantine" and the twisted faces in a Pablo Picasso painting.
After she is nearly torn apart by some of these creatures, Rose calls her husband Christopher (Sean Bean) for help. When he arrives, he is joined by Officer Thomas Gucci (Kim Coates), who seems to want to help but also is hiding something about the town.
When they finally find the remaining town residents, they discover the town has been turned into a hell by the evil spirit of a little girl who has a vendetta against it.
The rest of the film continues to develop more of a story that is already too drawn out to begin with.
That is probably the biggest problem with this film; it is trying too hard to deliver a story audiences can take seriously instead of making sure audiences walk out of the theater scared to death.
It does not help that it looks as if the film was not given a large budget to work with. When the creatures in the video game look more realistic than the ones in the film, people will not be scared.
The film can be commended, though, for trying to take itself seriously since we have yet to see a video game adaptation that does.
Mitchell makes sure her character is constantly horrified and never turns her into a cliché superwoman who would be more set on saving the world instead of simply saving her daughter.
Hopefully, this film will start a movement for video game adaptations to be done more seriously, but until that happens, audiences should stay at home and stick to playing the games instead of watching the films.
