It's really pretty. There are some shots and camera moves that are straight out of the various games, and it uses some fairly abundant CGI to do some very nice things. I'm much more of a practical effects guy because I always feel a little bit of falseness when I see CGI in a movie, but since it's an adaptation of a computer game series, being a little false kinda fits right in. And it is well done. There are some scenes that are disturbing and gruesome. It's a very dark movie.
A lot of the music is either pulled directly from the various games or is recorded to match the style and orchestrations of the music from the games. I recognized themes from 3 and 4, and the mood and atmosphere was just about dead-on perfect.
The problem with the film is the story. If you're not really quite intimate with the games and the backstory with those, then you evidently lose a lot of the context and the story becomes confusing. The storytelling aspect is much harder to pin down. And there is story-- this reads like another one in the series, but with more people and fewer puzzles. It's not really cleanly told, though I'm not sure how to clean it up and still stay faithful to the game feel. It smacks of a much longer first cut somewhere out there that has some vital connecting information that was left out. I think strategically placed bits may have allowed for another 10-15 minutes of movie, but it was already ringing in at over two bills and change.
The dialogue... oy, the dialogue. There are some lines that cause you to laugh out loud, but not in a good way. I don't know if somebody was trying to intentionally inject a bit of levity in an otherwise reallyfreakindark movie, but somebody didn't get the memo.
I enjoyed it. Some of that may have been that I got to sit next to a pretty girl, but I genuinely liked the movie. And I'll buy the DVD.