Monster Hunter: The Hunt Begins 3 points
Monster hunter, Germany / United States / China / Japan, 2020
Direction and script: Paul WS Anderson, based on the eponymous video game
Duration: 103 minutes
Interpreters: Milla Jovovich, Tony Jaa, Ron Pearlman, Diego Boneta, Megan Good, John Helman, Jin Au-Teung.
Premiere: Available in commercial rooms.
The cinemas reopeningAfter almost a year of closure forced by the pandemic, it was good news for movie lovers, who for 12 months embraced the placebo of watching movies at home. But those who really celebrated were the exhibiting companies, one of the few commercial sectors that had not yet restarted its activity within the framework of the new normal. When cinemas were authorized to reopen their doors in the middle of last week, those who enjoy watching movies sitting in a dark room – even with a chinstrap – fantasized that that day would be a party, like finding a love again that it had been forcibly ripped from them. That reverie lasted until the cinema chains announced the titles that would occupy their screens from this first Thursday of premieres.
The making of that list, in which it is found Monster Hunter: The Hunt Begins, an action and science fiction film based on a video game, highlighted something that is obvious, but not always taken for granted: that the happiness of moviegoers and that of exhibitors belong to different orders. That business is one thing, whose only libido is played on the bed of balance sheets and accounting entries, and cinematic enjoyment is another. That it will have lax limits and not always clear, but not so much as to exclude this film outright starring Milla Jovovich, flashy production and lean content. But there is logic to trying to explain why such a poor film is one of the few that benefited from the limited space available in pandemic theaters: Monster hunter it identifies more, even from the aesthetic point of view, with the exhibitors ‘objectives than with the spectators’ pleasure.
It is a piece of crude design, whose story fits into four lines: An elite squad accidentally falls into a desert parallel world full of giant monsters and its members must survive. The rest is the mere putting into action without nuances or variants of this basic premise, using as the main expressive resource the interspersed of frenetic sequences in which everything is visually confusing, with others made in hyper slow motion. The experience is a bit like that of getting into a car driven by an inexperienced driver, who makes little but jerky progress. There are hardly any glimpses of anything beyond that narrative wasteland in the bond that the protagonist establishes with a warrior from the other world.
Can exhibitors be blamed for making room for a mess like this? To be honest no. Its objectives are economic and it is even possible that the decision to include Monster hunter Among today’s premieres I report the dreamed cash count. But for those who hope that sitting back in a movie theater will be that party they imagined, from here it is recommended to put up with the withdrawal syndrome a little longer.
