103 min | PG-13 | December 18, 2020 | Screen Gems
Artemis and her unit chase a vanished team into a sandstorm and come out in a world ruled by monsters the size of buildings. Paul W. S. Anderson turns a Capcom game into one long chain of soldiers versus claws. The monsters land. The movie does not.
Artemis leads a United Nations security team across a desert in search of a missing unit. A sandstorm pulls the convoy through a portal into a parallel world. That world runs on giant monsters that burrow under the sand and breathe fire. Paul W. S. Anderson adapts the Capcom game into a picture built to stage encounters between soldiers and creatures. The film wants nothing more than that. It commits to the want.
Milla Jovovich plays Artemis as a soldier who meets the impossible with weapons and tactics. She treats monsters the size of buildings as logistical problems and never blinks. Tony Jaa plays The Hunter, a stranded native who speaks no English and communicates through combat and shared survival. The long middle stretch traps two people who cannot talk in a cave, and Jaa builds the partnership with his body instead of dialogue. Ron Perlman plays the Admiral under a blond wig and behind a sword, and he arrives late to explain a mythology the film barely uses.
Anderson writes and directs, and he cuts the action fast and tight. The editing fragments each monster into claws and teeth and flying grit. The Diablos, a horned creature that surfaces through the dunes, registers through scale and sound design more than through clear geography. Anderson shoots the desert bright and flat under a hard sun, which strands the creatures in a landscape with no shadows to hide in. The score pounds under every set piece at one fixed volume.
The film moves from one fight to the next and then stops rather than ends. The soldiers from the opening convoy exist to be threatened. T.I. plays Lincoln, Meagan Good plays Dash, Diego Boneta plays Marshall, and Josh Helman plays Steeler, and the script hands them names and little else. Anderson builds a clean delivery system for monster attacks and never reaches past it. The result honors the game and forgets the film.