Film Review: MONSTER HUNTER (2020): A Speedrun of a Video Game Adaptation That Could’ve Used Some Save Spots

Monster Hunter Review

Monster Hunter (2020) Film Review, a movie directed Paul W. S. Anderson, starring Milla Jovovich, Tony Jaa, Ron Perlman, T.I., Diego Boneta, Meagan Good, Josh Helman, Jin Au-Yeung, Jannik Schümann, Nanda Costa, Nic Rasenti, Clyde Berning, Paul Hampshire, Bart Fouche, and Aaron Beelner.

I feel obligated to once again clarify that I am not a gamer, and to once again ask for penitence on account of it. Sure, I might be outing myself as unfamiliar with the medium and thus offering its most vociferous fans ammo for their counter-critiques against me, but I see it more as an honest admittance of gaming naïvete, thus revealing my less-biased approach to seeing games get adapted to the cinematic medium. After all, isn’t that sort of honesty the kind of ethics in video games journalism those fans have been calling on for years now?

That’s all to preface that I was under no predilections that something called Monster Hunter would be, by mainstream film criticism standards, “good”. I expected what was advertised: a bunch of Earth dwellers suddenly finding themselves out of their element in a New World (quite literally), fighting off sand-swimming kaijus, crinkly desert spiders, and massive dragon knock-offs alike. And that’s exactly what Monster Hunter gave me … but in the most irritating, migraine-inducing ways.

Based on the massively popular Capcom franchise, Monster Hunter follows Natalie Artemis (Milla Jovovich), a U.S. military ranger captain, as she and her U.N. security team are out on a recon mission in the deserts of Afghanistan. Upon finding the end of the previous team’s last tracks, a large lightning-charged sandstorm immediately encroaches them (and immediately in terms of the narrative, too, as we’re barely 10 minutes into the movie when this inciting event hits). Engaging some sort of ruins along the road that tear apart the very fabric of space, Artemis and her team go tumbling through the portal and arrive in the much more sandy and barren New World.

Almost immediately (again, what an incredibly cutthroat pace this film has), Artemis and her cohorts find the previous teams remains … mysteriously charred into melded-together piles. They are given no time to grieve as they’re suddenly attacked by a giant, scaly monster that swims through the sand dunes as if they were water, and it leaves the outfit more ragged than when they started. Eventually Artemis is the only survivor, steering clear of the sand using the rocky islands, all the while avoiding the underground caverns as well on account of the crab/spider creatures hungrily nesting down there.

Her luck turns after she meets up with the Hunter (Tony Jaa), another man who’s been abandoned in this sea-like desert. Initially wary of and hostile towards each other (not to mention unable to speak each other’s languages), the two form a shaky truce to travel towards a distant tower shrouded in the same lightning-charged clouds that brought Artemis to the New World. Hopefully that’s where she will be able to return home, and maybe get some answers as to where she’s been.

I couldn’t tell you the “rules” of the New World, nor why humans like the Hunter are capable of occupying any part of it; I couldn’t tell you who any of these characters are in relation to the game’s or the narrative’s own mythos, because the writing is incredibly sparse; really, I couldn’t tell you anything else about this, and to a fair degree, neither can the film. Everything in the film exists as an extreme – bare-bones structure or excessive flourish – that’s solely in support of its core premise, laying the foundation for each successive set-piece and a potential franchise down the road. Monster Hunter has little respect for its own existence, and it treats its audience with the same sense of passive-aggressive apathy.

But before I get reported to the Fun Police, let me reiterate that that’s not necessarily a bad thing! You don’t go into a movie with a giant horned lizard-like thing and a woman wielding a sword nearly as tall and as wide as herself on its posters and expect … I dunno, tact? Nuance? Narrative explanations? No, you go in expecting to see a bad-ass lady and her sidekicks beat the shit out of some kaiju! And Anderson, arguably one of cinema’s biggest wife guys and apparently Capcom’s go-to filmmaker, is more than happy to provide.

No, Monster Hunter’s main issue is that it has no sense of temporality. The editing is unbelievably jumpy, barely giving our minds’ eyes any time at all to marinate on Anderson’s overcrowded frames. I respect others’ interpretations of this choice, but I’m inclined to view it more as a disservice because Anderson is splicing up a world of immaculate detail that he’s created into thousands of disparate, obfuscated little bits. It’s kinda like the feeling of smoking a massive blunt on your own and then not being able to keep your thoughts together for a single minute before getting sidetracked out of boredom/paranoia/disinterest (but to be fair/mean, the editor’s first name is Doobie, so … **shrugs**).

The piece becomes a jarring and atonal one that’s hard to connect to or even visually comprehend. This feels like an undermining of Anderson’s own abilities to both himself and his audience, but given how capable the rest of the film looks (not to mention how long he’s been in the game) he’s gotta be trolling us – or at the very least aware of it, and just not giving a shit (making it feel disappointingly cynical all of a sudden).

Thus, every other one of the film’s shortcomings is magnified: the lack of backstory, the shoddy VFX in establishing shots, the rote performances (ugh, Ron Perlman, why?), and the shallow characterizations. Jovovich gives an occasionally visceral performance, but in terms of no-nonsense female military grunts I prefer Megan Fox.

Also, call me out for being too sensitive, but something about not having the Hunter speak English, not translating Jaa’s dialogue via subtitles, and still having a lot of the film’s humor hinge on that loss in translation for its English-speaking audience felt alienating, and not in the way the filmmakers intended it to be via “lost in the New World” vibes. (And that’s saying something, seeing as that wasn’t even the main controversy about race this film had going for it!)

Yet I’d be remiss if I didn’t give Monster Hunter its due credit, as despite its plethora of concepts not really adding up to anything cogent, they’re still wondrous to behold as caged behemoths. From the sand-sailing cold open to the Hunter’s fire-conjuring weaponry to the monsters’ fun designs, this is a blast when it wants to be. Anderson even offers us some particularly gnarly body horror for PG-13 fare, including one of the grossest human deaths (and monster “births”) Hollywood’s given us in a hot minute. Paul Haslinger’s score is an occasionally-inspired work, too. Oh, and Jovovich flirts with a furry, which itself is worthy of a whole rating boost.

If the ultimate goal was to emulate the experience of playing two rounds at the arcade before remembering that, oh yeah, you came to the mall because you needed new clothes, and leaving to go finish your more pressing errands before even breaking your personal best at Galaga and then forgetting all about that gaming sesh on the drive home, then yeah, this is spot-on.

Rating: 4/10

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