MONSTER HUNTER. The Trailer Was Better

Monster Hunter was the seventh film based on a video game in which Milla Jovovich has appeared as yet another version of a big-screen heroine. It is also the sixth film in which the actress has starred under the direction of Paul W.S. Anderson, who happens to be her husband and the father of their two daughters. The Andersons have come up with quite an interesting way to make money, to say the least. I imagine a considerable portion of the budget always has to be set aside to cover the contracts of such a married duo. Anderson’s scripts are clearly written for his wife, structured in a way that justifies hiring her. You can see this even in films where Jovovich is not the main focus.

In The Three Musketeers, the female role was noticeably expanded—presumably specifically for Jovovich. Nothing like a good business model; I wish them the best, but unfortunately the quality of the couple’s joint projects has for some time been downright abysmal. Do you also get the impression that ever since Paul W.S. Anderson began creating films with Jovovich, his work has gone to the dogs?

After Mortal Kombat and the Resident Evil series, Paul W.S. Anderson returns to his beloved video-game aesthetic, drawing in Monster Hunter from the famous Japanese RPG series by Capcom. The game is exactly as simple in its premise as the film’s plot is. The hero faces a massive beast and must kill it—basically, that’s the whole idea. In the 2020 film the hero is Captain Artemis (and yes, the reference to the Greek goddess of the hunt is no coincidence), who, along with her squad, is transported into a kind of desert world full of gigantic monsters. Together with a Hunter she encounters, she must find a way to defeat these enormous opponents and carve out a path home.

The biggest problem with Monster Hunter is that it has absolutely no idea for a story. The entire starting point—the soldiers being transported, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, to another world—is nothing more than a pretext to pit them against monsters and give the visual-effects team room to showcase their skills. In that regard, the film doesn’t disappoint: the monsters look vigorous, impressive, and, most importantly, convincing—they genuinely feel powerful. The music, with its electronic elements, also suits the atmosphere well.

The problem is that Monster Hunter is best watched in fragments, from action scene to action scene, because whatever happens between them is completely irrelevant. Referring to one of the film’s scenes—until the stone falls onto the sand and awakens the forces underground, nothing of significance happens at all.

The moment when the director-screenwriter decides to tie the plot together a bit more by introducing Ron Perlman’s character comes far too late—around 20 minutes before the finale. And that is exactly how much time is left for the climactic sequence, which feels edited at high speed and completely out of sync with the very sluggish, overlong, and—let’s be honest—pointless first act of Artemis’s story. Call me petty, but it almost looks as if Anderson never sat down after editing to calmly watch what he had filmed, because he would surely have noticed these discrepancies right away.

This is, therefore, yet another case of a film whose trailer, thanks to its condensed form, is better than the final product. Anyone craving an adventure in the spirit of Monster Hunter would be better off grabbing a PS4, Xbox One, or a good PC and playing Monster Hunter: World (2018). That’s exactly what I intend to do, because I need to erase and compensate for the bad impression left by this clumsily written and directed adaptation.