Review of Monster Hunter (2020) by Onurahi — 29 Mar 2021

I know that the modern filmmakers do tend to follow trends and pick up ANY popular story/game/book/animated films and turn it into a cinema adaptation. But somehow in cases more than often it turns our to be a failure (or close to a failure). Maybe it can be explained by the poor understanding of the world the filmmakers are trying to show, or its just the wish to adapt it to their own view... What they fail to understand - is that the uniqueness of those stories/games/books/animated films made them so popular. And that in order to make the adaptation no less popular - you need to somehow stick to that world you're showing there.

The movie itself looks as if the screenplay was prepared on the last day before filming. The dialogues sound dumb and childish, the scenes do not have any weight. We do not have any character explained here, nor do we have any idea what actually happened and what kind of world that is. We do not have any idea of what those Teams were looking for in the desert. We do not have any idea about the original mission. And finally - we do not have ANY idea about how the other (Monster) world works. Natasha just suddenly learns that her weapon has some extra feature (without prior explanation), she does not seem to care where she is and what is going on, and she somehow knows how to use a hand crossbow right from the start (although I doubt any US military ever used ANYTHING similar).

As for the ending - I do not even feel like talking about it - it is an absolute disregard towards the audience. Like saying "We do not care about what is going on, or what is going to happen next. Never cared, actually... But here we wanna hint that You'll have another several **** parts of this movie in the future, so enjoy!" It does not have any logic, we do not understand "WHAT" or "WHY". It just happens, out of the blue, so deal with it.

The quality of the CGI and overall picture is quite nice, though. It's a pity that they shoved such a horrible story and screenplay into such a beautiful wrapping. This idea had a nice potential for a good trilogy (or more), but the indifferent attitude of the filmmakers buried it for good...