Silent Hill (Cristophe Gans, 2006)
I saw Silent Hill about a week ago. I’ve never actually played the games, but what I’ve been told about them makes me think I’d like them a lot. Director Cristophe Gans made the moody and very cool Le pacte des loups (Brotherhood of the Wolf), which, although the script wasn’t wonderful, was very well executed, I thought. And, of course, Roger Avary wrote the script. Roger Avary is interesting, perhaps most famous for working in a video store with Quentin Tarantino, and then writing work on Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, and Pulp Fiction. I’ve always wanted to like him and his movies more than I actually do, since he seems like a smart and cool guy, but Killing Zoe was a derivative nihilistic bore, and The Rules of Attraction was competent and at times funny, but didn’t live up to the source material at all, so I had my doubts.
And I was right. The movie is stylish and very cool, and at times really creepy, especially creepy looking, but what the hell is going on in this script? The dialogue, especially in the first act, is just screwed up. It’s stilted and unnatural, the sort of thing that makes you go “people don’t talk like that!” every few minutes. The set-up is weak and uninteresting, and you just want people to go to Helltown USA so people will speak fewer annoying lines, and get into the action.
When the main characters arrive in Silent Hill, things make a turn for the better. The first time the darkness falls and the town changes into some twisted nightmare hell version of itself, it’s awesome, and it gets better every time it happens. The effects are very nicely done, both the makeup and the digital stuff. It’s not directly scary, but it’s creepy and makes you jump, which is decent. People continue doing and saying things that make no sense, but it’s ok, you forgive it because of the other things that are going on.
Then, when the mysteries start being resolved, the group of wannabe witch-burners from Monty Python and the Holy Grail show up, wanting to burn some witches and claiming they were turned into newts. This goes on for a while, until you get mightily fed up with them, and they kill one of the secondary characters. You want them to die for being such an idiotically bad and cliched exaggeration of fundamentalist christians (such an idiotic group to begin with that you’d think it’d be hard to exaggerate them), and you get your wish.
The climactic scene is one of my favourites in the movie, a sort of Dante’s Inferno by way of Hellraiser and Japanese tentacle porn, with strands of sapient barbed wire snaking through a church, grabbing people, invading their orifices, and tearing them apart in detail, with characters unable to do anything but stare slack-jawed at what they’ve unleashed. Almost everyone dies, which means that almost everyone annoying dies, so it’s a nice pay-off.
The aftermath is also decent, but by then you’ve stopped caring.
This movie is a typical example of one of the ways screenwriting can fail. As a treatment, this probably looked very good, the general story they’re telling is not bad at all, it’s marginally original, well put together, and so on. But when writing out the actual scenes, something went horribly wrong, and every character became wooden, the dialog became stilted, and people’s motivations and actions made no sense. The devil’s in the details, as they say.
All in all, it’s probably worth seeing, for the nightmare visuals and climactic scenes of pandemonium, if nothing else. For anyone who’s not a horror fan, it’s going to be a waste of time, and even horror fans will likely feel at least a bit let down.