3 Short Paragraphs: Monster Hunter

 2020, Paul WS Anderson (AVP: Alien vs Predator) -- download

I grabbed the game, Monster Hunter: World a while ago and never really got into it. I am not surprised, because despite my affection for so many things Japanese, I cannot find interest in the stereotypical Japanese video game style. I cannot put my thumb on it, but while I love the world building and visualizations of most of their games, I cannot get into the gameplay. I thought that this one, that centered on slaying dragon-like monsters, and building better weapons & armor from their corpses could be fun, so grabbed a cheap PS4 copy. Alas, once I saw the looting animations depicting merely wiggles and motions, taking visually shapeless masses from the monsters, my interest waned. But still, that world is intriguing.

And surprisingly, Anderson was pretty faithful to that world, even recreating elements of the opening scenes from the game I have in the movie, albeit altering them for cinematic desire. The movie begins with a cadre of monster hunters sailing the sand sea when they are attacked by fiery kaiju and one main character is lost. Switch to Anderson alumni, his wife Mila, leading a group of soldiers in some nameless desert in some nameless American intervention when they are magically whisked away to the Monster Hunter World. They all quickly die but Mila and she must learn how to survive, and kill monsters in this new world, so she can find the source of the magic and eventually return home to our world, and kill more monsters.

Despite Mila doing an abysmal job of convincing us she is an American soldier, the centre act of the movie, where she learns about the world and how to fight the monsters from Tony Jaa (Ong Bak), is fun and exciting. The CGI monsters are horrific and terrifying and  the ludicrous bravery the two show when going hand-to-hand with kaiju sized monsters is very much the video game. The final act is just dumb dumb with pointless fighting and losing (the newly introduced monster hunters are as useless as her soldiers were) but tons of "ooo, that's from the game!" scenes that serve nothing for the movie. All of this was just so that we could return to our world and show how Mila and her electro-daggers are worth a 1000% more than an entire army of conventional weapons. In that I know what I am getting in the Anderson/Jovovich movies, this was about on-par with some of the lesser Resident Evil movies, i.e. not good but some fun.