Statistically, you probably haven’t seen the Monster Hunter movie, probably because it came out at exactly the wrong time. Paul W.S. Anderson’s adaptation of Capcom’s video game series was released in December 2020, during a period where many people were still staying home rather than going to the theaters. It’s one of the only box-office disappointments of Anderson’s career, but it’s one of his best collaborations with Milla Jovovich — an epic genre mashup that effectively delivers on the scale and danger of the games.
The setup is essentially an isekai: Captain Artemis (Jovovich) leads a U.N. Joint Security Operations team sent to investigate a mysterious disappearance in the desert, before being transported to a fantastical world where they encounter many monsters and eventually an ally called The Hunter (Tony Jaa). There’s also a positively feral Ron Perlman, closer to his Beauty and the Beast look than anything he has done since.
The most important thing to get right in a Monster Hunter movie is the sense of scale, and Anderson and his team absolutely nail it. The massive landscapes are peppered with impossibly large skeletons, and our heroes use giant weapons to face off against the hulking monsters. Anderson uses top-down shots and extended slow zoom-outs to evoke a larger-than-life fantasy world before going wide and letting the monsters fill the entire frame. He’s able to create moments of spectacular awe through spare and effective use of slow-motion effects. Plus, the whole thing looks great — it can be easy to miss in the nonstop action and frantic editing, but Monster Hunter has terrific lighting, with bright white sands in the desert contrasting darker scenes full of meticulously placed pops of light and color to draw your eye.
But my favorite part upon revisiting the movie is how Monster Hunter mashes genres together. On the surface, it’s a fantasy movie pitting soldiers against hulking creatures. But Anderson uses that premise to seamlessly cycle between inspirations from some of the greatest monster movies in history, with an Alien-style egg laying, a Jurassic Park-esque stampede, a Shelob-like giant spider lair, some Jaws-inspired sequences with monsters swimming in the sand, and other kaiju and creature feature staples.
That’s all on top of the terrific buddy comedy setup between Artemis and The Hunter. Neither can understand the other’s language, which leads to an at first contentious and eventually quite charming and funny dynamic, pairing his impish laugh with her sternness. (A particular highlight: Her delivering an epic “Let’s do this” before a big battle and him responding with a confused “Hmmm?”).
One of the more controversial elements about Monster Hunter, even among my fellow Paul W.S. Anderson die-hards, is the editing style. Anderson brought in Doobie White, who had previously worked with him on Resident Evil: The Final Chapter but is perhaps best known for his work with Neveldine and Taylor on the chaos-cinema staple Gamer. The result is a lot of fast-paced editing. At times, it’s too frantic, especially during the action sequences, where you lose out on some of the fluidity of Jaa and Jovovich’s terrific action skills. One of the greatest athletes to ever grace movie screens, Jaa still delivers with some killer flips, impressive kicks, and one hell of a sword, even if the movie sometimes struggles to keep up with him. But the approach does effectively sell the turmoil of the world, especially as Artemis tries to understand exactly what the hell she’s gotten herself into and what rules this land is governed by.
Anderson has a long history adapting video games, starting with his classic Mortal Kombat, running through his Resident Evil franchise, and looking forward with his upcoming House of the Dead adaptation. Some fans of the Resident Evil games rejected his movies at the time because of a lack of perceived faithfulness (these are definitely “vibes over fealty” adaptations), and while Monster Hunter brings in classes, costumes, and weapons from the game franchise, the actual monster hunts don’t resemble the ones in the games all that closely. But that’s OK! It feels like a Monster Hunter movie, and what separates Anderson from many other filmmakers adapting video game and comics projects these days is the fact that he isn’t embarrassed of the source material. He’s a true fan who also happens to have immense technical skill. And there may be more on the way, someday: The ending sets up a possible Monster Hunter sequel, and both Anderson and Jovovich have said they’d like to make another one and that Anderson has worked on a script. Add Tár into the mix, and you have a whole universe of great Monster Hunter movies.
Monster Hunter is streaming on Hulu.
