#Meander movie explained series

Okay, so here’s a big problem: Tony Jaa is clearly the lead. It’s not long before attrition and Darwinism leads to Artemis becoming the Final Girl, at which point she finally makes the acquaintance of the Hunter, played by renowned martial artist Tony Jaa (Ong Bak). There, they’re beset by a Black Diablos before ending up facing Nerscylla.

Oh, she also has a wedding ring she keeps in her pocket and occasionally gazes at longingly, but don’t worry: it won’t matter in even the slightest way.Īrtemis and her team (including actors Tip “T.I.” Harris and Meagan Good, among others) are on a mission in an anonymous stretch of desert for the United Nations when a mystical portal shunts them over to another dimension. How do we know Artemis is a badass? Because she dismissively calls the men under her command “ladies.” Get it? Because she’s a girl! What a badass. The problem, in addition to Artemis being a wholly original creation unconnected to the game and thus a strange person to ask fans to get on board with as the main character, is that “badass soldier” is where her character development began and ended.

#Meander movie explained series

(At least commercially, as the Resident Evil franchise has been largely critically panned but earned $1.2 billion worldwide, making it the highest-grossing film series based on a video game.)Īs such, it’s also easy to see why they took the plunge on Anderson’s vision, and why his wife Milla Jovovich, who previously headlined the Resident Evil movies (most recently in 2017’s abysmal Resident Evil: The Final Chapter), was enlisted into the lead role of badass UN military commander Natalie Artemis. Especially given the huge success of Monster Hunter: World in 2018, which reinvigorated the series on modern consoles, it’s not hard to see why both Capcom and Sony thought there was cinematic gold in them thar monster-filled hills, especially when their previous pairing on Resident Evil seemed to work out well for both. Riven with storytelling missteps virtually from the opening scene, Monster Hunter fails to rise to even the low bar of “not good, but not terrible” that at least a few of the Resident Evil flicks (and definitely Mortal Kombat) meet.įor the uninitiated, Monster Hunter has been a popular franchise for Capcom since 2004, depicting a pre-industrial world where monsters dwell and players take on the role of the titular Hunter to track down and kill a menagerie of strange and deadly beasts. It’s rare to see a movie so utterly beholden to its own labyrinthine mythology to the point of bafflement, while also being entirely uninterested in extrapolating on it. Anderson’s Monster Hunter, to remind us how rare good video game movies are.Īnderson, who previously did reasonably well helming 1995’s Mortal Kombat and the original 2002 Resident Evil, descends into Uwe Boll levels of incomprehensibility here, creating a film breathtaking for all the ways it steps wrong. Only blue skies ahead, right? Well, not so fast: here comes the latest cinematic game defenestration, writer/director Paul W.S.

It didn’t have to be like this – earlier this year, Paramount’s Sonic the Hedgehog hit theaters, and, in a surprise to pretty much everyone, the altogether pleasant family pic seemed to be a sign of better things to come. We may be barreling towards the tail end of December, but it seems 2020 isn’t done with us yet: under the wire, it’s delivered one of the worst action movies in recent memory, and another addition to the Video Game Movie Adaptation Hall of Shame.