Monster Hunter (2020)

Monster Hunter arrives as a 2020 action fantasy from Paul W. S. Anderson, a man who has spent two decades converting video game properties into vehicles for his wife, and this one follows the formula with a devotion that borders on liturgy. Milla Jovovich plays Captain Natalie Artemis, a UN security officer in Afghanistan who is yanked through a dimensional portal into a desert world where enormous creatures rule and bullets do very little. Tony Jaa grunts and swings a giant blade. Ron Perlman appears late as an Admiral and explains the Sky Tower in the manner of a man reading a summary handed to him moments earlier. The plot is a corridor, and the film walks it briskly.

The casting deserves a note. A 2020 action picture headlined by a woman, with Black, Thai, Latino, and East Asian performers filling out the ranks, is not nothing. But the diversity sits in the ensemble and stays there. No scene comments on it, no character has an arc shaped by it, and race exists in this film the way the sand exists, as scenery. Jovovich's captain is competent, learns the Hunter's craft, and lands the killing blow on the Diablos. That is a credit to her, not an argument. The film never proposes a thesis about gender, and seems unaware it could.

What is absent is more striking than what is present. There is no ecological parable here, no corporation to indict, no body politics, no neurodivergent interiority, no rewriting of real history. The script is close to wordless for long stretches, which spares us any sermonizing. Its entire intellectual content arrives in a single epigraph about hidden worlds. Then the monsters eat people.