MONSTER HUNTER: Paul W.S. Anderson’s Still Got It… Whatever “It” Is

I appreciate the writing and critical contribution of the people who came up with and proliferated the phrase “vulgar auteurism”, I really do. That being said, it’s one of the stupidest concepts to be thrown into a discussion of movies this century, along with “elevated horror” or “nicecore”. Some names of directors who have been associated with this term range from John Carpenter, Abel Ferrara, Walter Hill, to Clint Eastwood, Michael Mann, and Steven Spielberg. If this smattering tells us anything it’s that this term has no real meaning or distinction from just… auteurism. But then you get to a name like Paul W.S. Anderson. Anderson, like peers Roland Emmerich, Michael Bay, and John McTiernan is the kind of filmmaker who ‘vulgar auteurism’ is really about. The type of auteur you’d try to make the case for as an auteur in the same way someone might try to make the case for Little Ceaser’s “pizza” as pizza.

Sample Platter Cinema

A nice thing about PWSA’s latest film Monster Hunter is that it successfully adapts its origin video-game by giving us a completely ambiguous, open world with minimal rules and doesn’t try to force in a convoluted “story” or “lore” to justify its existence. In the same way that Emmerich’s 10,000 BC had a dinosaur jungle, the Ice Age, and the Pyramids of Giza within 50km of each other, this approach of “let’s throw all kinds of shit from other movies you like into this one” is one of the fastest and easiest ways to entertain audiences with minimal creative effort. Especially for me, a sucker for visuals, Monster Hunter’s vast open landscapes of white sands, ancient runes, and jagged rocks filmed spectacularly in the Namibian desert (where Mad Max: Fury Road was also filmed) with epic sweeping panoramas – photographed by longtime PWSA collaborator Glen MacPherson – made this movie pleasing to the eyes.

The action sequences are generous and plenty with a style that tries to toe the line between Paul Greengrass’s now-famous hyper-cutting from the latter two Bourne films and Michael Bay’s ‘structured chaos’ in the set-pieces from Transformers. The pace of the movie is unrelenting, moving from set-piece to set-piece and charging forward with monster attacks to interrupt the brief moments of respite where we see the teensiest bits of character development like Milla Jovovich’s Natalie Artemis looking at a ring that says “forever” on it given to her by a loved one from back home.

Much of the chemistry between the characters, particularly the two leads (Milla Jovovich and Tony Jaa) is communicated through the ways they wield weapons, coordinate attacks against the monsters, and of course, fight each other as well. There’s some very corny exposition here and there but luckily kept to a minimum and the relationship between the two is developed mainly through how much they save each other’s asses from dying. In general, if something is exploding, getting its shit kicked, or shooting off bows or bullets then there’s less time to showcase Anderson’s generally poor writing and dialogue.

A Time-Machine to the 90s B-Movie

In contrast to how completely drained of life, power, and yes, testosterone that Michael Bay’s Netflix movie 6 Underground was compared to almost everything he made before it, PWSA is one of the few 90’s era action directors who managed to retain the DNA of that bygone Hollywood B-cinema. Monster Hunter is a relic of sorts, where the guts and action, unrefined and tawdry as they are, are at least based on a genuine creative impulse rather than a fake injection of “meaning” or “purpose” either in the form of symbolic social lectures or furthering an IP. This lends the movie refreshing ease and low-stakes watch which hardly exists within the industry anymore. I personally can’t believe I’m saying this either, because this is the exact type of movie that I would roll my eyes at if it existed in any previous decade of Hollywood filmmaking.

There’s a case to be made that Monster Hunter is to PWSA what Independence Day was to Roland Emmerich, a movie which, in spite of the director’s overall mediocrity, managed to curate most of the good qualities of his style while sanding over much of the bad. There is also a case to be made that Monster Hunter is not really that much different or better than anything from PWSA’s past, but for the fact that the pool for blockbuster cinema has been drained to such a shallow depth that PWSA’s brand of filmmaking has become by virtue something unique and refreshing. Good for him, I guess.

Monster Hunter is currently streaming on various platforms and available on Blu-ray.

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