With ‘The Last of Us’, the question of whether fidelity to a source simply consists of replicating screens or we are talking about something deeper is put on the table again. Is it enough to copy the aesthetics, the design of the plans, the costumes of the actors to have a good adaptation? Can a good adaptation differ completely from the material you are taking as a reference?
We are afraid that there is no clear answer for it. But someone who can have it is Paul WS Anderson, who after years dedicated to carrying out the ‘Resident Evil’ franchise starring Mila Jovovich, now has another adaptation out of his sleeve that takes a video game as a mere point of reference to launch a proposal that goes at its own pace: ‘Monster Hunter‘, which you can already see on Netflix.
In this case, the fantasy world of the original Capcom games is completely left behind and we focus on a terrestrial protagonistJovovich again. Here a group of soldiers who are transported to a basically desert world (at least the portion we see of it) and are annihilated with the exception of his captain. She teams up with a local warrior (Tony Jaa) to defeat the ferocious local wildlife.
The result of this very different starting point is a frenetic monster action movie so concise, with so few settings and characters, that there are moments when it borders on abstraction. It is like a reduction to the minimum essence of the question “what is a video game”, only that the original argument is overlooked. Turning absences into virtue, filling the set with amusing nods to the original (characters scavenge corpses for items to add to their inventories), Paul WS Anderson isn’t close to getting a series on HBO. As far as I’m concerned, he doesn’t even need to.
