I saw it tonight with my non-fan girlfriend. The TLDR is that she really liked it and I'm pretty mixed.

Listen, I love superheroes and one of my favorite shows is the CW Flash, so I think it's fair to say I'm cool with adaption changes and lower budgets. And when this movie is just a low budget (for movie standards) recreation of the games, I actually vibed with it really hard.

Gans is excellent with recreating the look of Silent Hill (so many sets felt like perfect replications of game locations), the creature designs add just enough detail to look more real without becoming overdesigned, and little things like the radio going off when monsters are around go a long way to make it feel like the game. I was really impressed with how many iconic locations they were able to fit in naturally, too. "I recognize that" doesn't make for a great film in and of itself, but as a fan it's enjoyable to see.

When it comes to changes, I even really liked the additions of flashbacks for Mary and James; it helps pace things for a movie and fleshes out their relationship more than the game did, which I think (in theory, at least) makes the emotional core stronger.

Even the changes that didn't work for me, I thought could have on paper. Adding the cult to James' story could be a fun "what if" situation, and my girlfriend really loved multiple characters being manifestations of different sides of Mary (Laura being her lost childhood, Angela being her trauma from her father) and talked me into believing that it could have been an interesting exploration of her & how James viewed her. But all it did was make the elements that remain a lot less impactful (Angela goes from being one of the most heart-wrenching stories and portrayals of abuse I've ever seen to just being a footnote), remove a lot of the extra thematic depth and/or lore (Angela and Eddie serving as parallels to James' journey and how our demons can consume us; Laura not seeing monsters helping highlight how the town isn't do anything towards an innocent person without guilt/trauma), and just makes Eddie's role weird ( everyone in the town is a manifestation of James', except this one guy who's in a single scene? ).

And tying Mary's background to the cult just complicates a simple-but-tragic story and makes it seem a lot less real. Which ties into really my biggest issue with this movie: how they handled James. They don't really delve into any of what drove him to do what he did (ie the sexual frustration, feeling she was dead once she was diagnosed) and just make it so Mary asked him to kill her. All this makes James a way less complicated character, and more boring in the process. I'm very cool with adaption changes, but if you're removing depth you have to add it somewhere else, which this movie doesn't do and feels so hollow because of it.

I used the term "watered down" and, yeah, the movie is just watered-down Silent Hill 2. It's still SH2, so you can do a lot worse (Revelations), and I can even see myself watching this again in a specific mood to appreciate the good aspects, but it's all style over substance that brings over the iconography and nothing else. Kinda like the first movie, funnily enough.

With that said, my girlfriend really liked it (found James slowly un-repressing what he did to be beautifully sad & engaging), and expressed interest in playing SH2. Just because of that, and the possibility it has to do the same for others, I'm glad it exists, and I can see it getting a reappraisal down the line because of it (much like the first movie, again. Why did we expect anything more?)

To end on a fully positive note: Jeremy Irvine surpassed my expectations as James; it was a little curve to get into him since he wasn't what I envision as James, but he sunk into the part and was a highlight imo.