1st June 2023

I have been a fan of the monster hunter franchise for most of my life.

When the topic of videogame – film adaptation comes up between me and my friends (or “my friends and I” if my Mum is reading), I have held the strong opinion that a monster hunter film could be a fantastic fantasy world to set a story in.

And then a Monster Hunter movie came out.

Now, the new monster hunter film does a long shot from justice to the franchise it uses, for start, it has a bunch of army dudes enter the world to try and survive there. It doesn’t take much to see why that’s bollocks.

Imagine if Lord of the Rings replaced Frodo with John who works in a gardening centre, and Gandalf was a drug addled homeless man, thrust into a world of magic and just happened to be good at it… Actually, I think I would watch that, but you know what I mean.

I’ve had the idea for the story of a Monster Hunter film for a while, but recently, when I reached my 113th hour in Monster Hunter Rise, I decided to make the plunge and try to write the first film in a trilogy I have the general idea for.

There are four main points that I will have to learn my way around over this project, which are:

• The “cycle of revenge” story is a very overused story, so how can I adapt my idea into something a little more interesting?
• I understand great action scenes from films like The Raid, Mission: Impossible, John Wick, etc… How do I adapt my understanding of action away from human vs human and into human vs animal?
• How can you make an empathetic villain in a creature that never speaks, acts on its base instincts, and kills characters you liked?
• How can the elements of Monster Hunter, a very Japanese styled and anime inspired game, be adapted to my western understanding of action and story structure without it coming across as disrespectful to the source material? As an extension to this, what elements and mechanics of the game can be used as symbolism beyond their use within the story?

I have a few preemptive ideas for how to answer these questions, but I imagine those ideas will be proved wrong or developed on over the course of the project.

Preemptively:

• I remember hearing someone say that in the army, the best soldiers are either psychopaths or hero’s, meaning either people willing to kill because they don’t care, or kill to take the burden off other people. Now, I don’t want any of my main characters to be literal psychopaths, but damaged / traumatised people looking for some kind of revenge or self punishment in hunting could work. Clearly now, you can see the tone of what I’m going for is far different to anything you see in the game, but when adapting something like this to a film which wants to emulate reality to some extent, some things need to be taken more seriously. I don’t know anyone who goes fox hunting, but I would imagine that the only two ways you can justify it to yourself are;
  • “These foxes are going to kill my chickens if I don’t stop them”, or
  • “Lets kill these ruddy foxes and bathe in their blood as a sacrifice to Khorne”
• When thinking of great action, I think of both The Raid, and Pirates of the Caribbean, for wildly different reasons. One good reason though is the elements of storytelling that happen in the action. In The Raid (far more predominantly The Raid 2), the storytelling builds up into an action scene, and the story doesn’t get told while the action is playing – each action scene is a stopping point, where we understand either our hero wins, or it’s all over and the story stops. Pirates has storytelling happening throughout the scene, [spoilers] our heroes arguing over Will’s ability to pull in the first one, trying to convince Norrington to attack Will in the second one, or deciding to marry Will in the third. We don’t talk about the films beyond the third.
  The lesson that can be applied to ours is that we can’t have our characters talking, but we can’t have the same sort of amazing choreography that we get in the Raid. The story has to build to that point, and we as an audience need to be waiting to find the resolution. While story beats cannot happen like in Pirates:
  “Engarde great beasie!”, *deafening roar*
  We can have a lot of payoffs. Our hero brings traps and tricks to the fight, using previously established items in ways we haven’t seen before. The constant use of payoffs to win the fight from the beginning of the film is going to be vital to making confrontations feel exciting.
• This one is simple enough, though the monster (I’ll give up dancing around it, I naturally want to use a Rathalos), can’t speak or scheme, it can emote. We can make it think. It can use things previously established, and come to conclusions, and if the audience can connect the dots too, the payoff is going to be all the bigger. To make it empathetic, we can cheat. I intend to have it tie into the theme above in that everything it does it is doing to protect others, in this case its young. After its mate, a Rathian, dies, it tries to guard the unhatched eggs in the nest, and every action it does in the film will be to either defend the nest, or do a preemptive/retaliatory strike against those that threaten its nest. It’s a cheating technique, and quite lazy to be honest, but when your villain can’t talk, it is a good way to have a connection to the audience that they can understand.
• This final one is a doozy, and unfortunately I can’t think of an answer. Elements of mechanics can be used in different ways, e.g. – the armour made from monster bits can symbolise how the character felt when killing it. This would be more useful in the next film, having the hunter wear Rathalos armour to symbolise the arc he goes through in film one, and maybe taking the armour off or using new elements to physically demonstrate his growth. The respect for the cultural influences however is a difficult cookie to crack. The only thing I reckon I can do is try and have my love for the franchise come through. It’s not like I’m some executive thinking that it seems like a good money making opportunity, I’m a fan. I am basically writing fanfiction, and say what you like about fanfiction writers, but they bloody love the stories they adapt. And having the characters in those stories knobbing, but we don’t need to go into that much detail on this project. The “Rath x Hunter” story that nobody is clamouring for can stay in the deepweb for now.

Now the next step is to finish my basic story layout and then try to start a first draft. I’ve done one story layout but it’s missing several elements, and I will update this when I have more to say.

16th June

I really need to get my thoughts in order about this film and I think writing it up here would be a good way to do that. To preempt it, I’m going to run through my idea for how the 3 films I have in my head would work, and then I’m going to dive deeper into the first film that I’m doing.

• Film one – A failed hero’s journey. Our main character, who we’ll call Arlo for now because I haven’t thought of a good name, goes on a quest for revenge against the monster that burned down his village when he was young (a rathalos). Along the journey he has people advising him against the hunt because he isn’t ready, only to fail his character arc in the end and kill the monster. His perception of hunting has gone from killing things to protect others, but he seeks revenge on one monster, to just wanting to kill monsters because he has nothing else to fight for.
• Film two – The beginning of redemption. The next two are less thought out. After being a hunter for some time, Arlo is hired by a village to defend it from a creature up in the mountains. On the hunt, he struggles to connect with others, and over the story fights the monster (a tigrex), and decides to find something that can help people without having to kill things.
• Film three – Becoming a hero. After being stranded with a caravan of traders and a science team in a volcano. As they start trying to leave, they get pursued by a Teostra that is disrupting the volcano to the point that it will soon erupt, and Arlo has to use his old hunting experience only to help avoid the monster, and in the end is willing to sacrifice himself for those he cares about.

So how does the first film get structured?

I have some scenes in mind to go into the film at points, it’s just the way they fit together that I’m struggling with. In vaguely chronological order:

• Opening scene is going to be “Arlo” as a child trying to flee his village at night while it it’s burned down by a wyvern veiled in smoke (the rathalos). He hides under a cart, and almost everyone else is cooked and killed when some traders arrive that take Arlo with them and drop him off at a nearby village.
• Arlo fleeing the village to hunt the Rath by himself after hearing that it’s back after a long hiatus.
• Arlo going through a trader hub, seeing many cultures of the hunting world, and cashing in a favour that one of the traders that picked him up gave him. The trader currently in charge recognises the debt, saw the burned down village, and is reticent to go back there.
• A hunting party is assembled by the (at this point in the timeline) newly assembled hunter’s guild, and Arlo’s mentor gets a lift with the party to catch up with Arlo.
• Arlo tries and fails to kill a monster much weaker than the Rath, maybe a Great Jaggi or Royal Ludroth. His mentor, let’s call him “Dan” saves him from the monster.
• The hunting party tries to fight the Rath and fails. Something they brought with them leads the Rath back to the location of Arlo, Dan, and his “love interest”, who gets killed. This however could be cut out and moved to the next plot point.
• The rath arrives at the village, following the scent of the people, and burning it down.
• Arlo finds a fleeing Dan, intending to fight him and instead focusing his efforts on fighting the Rath.
• Arlo finds the Rath, who only became active to get food for its unhatched eggs after the Rathian that gave birth to them died.
• He fights it after having some preparation time while the Rath was getting food, using assorted gadgets such as emergency flares, the discarded weapons of the fallen hunting party, and some sort of water/ice weapon against it that he gathered along the way (maybe a thunder weapon since that is more effective).
• After fighting and killing the Rath, a montage of it being taken back, used for armour, classic monster hunter stuff. A Kulu Ya Ku comes for the Rath nest.

All these scenes have a vague throughline, but in order for the death of the love interest to matter at all we need more scenes involving her. This is why I’d want to take her along with Daniel when looking for Arlo, but then there comes difficulties with why the Rathalos goes to them after killing the party – most likely because she gave a hunter something.

There’s also the issue that there’s quite a bit that needs to be established before the inciting incident about 15 mins in, but the flashback of the burning village will probably take around 4 mins, so we really need to establish every character relationship and worldbuilding element in around 10 mins instead of 15. Of course there is a lot established by the opening – tone, protagonist motivations, trader’s debt, and the Rathalos, but still.

Every plot structure I try to write up seems to be missing something, some core element or bit of flair. For example, in my head, the village Elder helped raise Arlo, but there isn’t a good place to put her and Arlo spending time together. It might be better if he was raised by the blacksmith, intending to become his protégé, but Arlo’s desire to get the Rath led him to training with Daniel. There are a couple of times where Arlo could speak with the blacksmith and establish their connection alongside new weaponry that gets used later to fight the Rath.

Ok, that’s one problem solved, Village Elders and that guff can come in later films.

I guess the main issue is how the pacing feels to me in the plan, it feels like it’s quite slow and character stuff for however many minutes, and then everything kicks off and you have less breathing room in the end. The end would be full of character choices, how to respond to the girl’s death, finding Daniel, how he reacts to finding why the Rath is back and such. I guess the only thing to do is one last scene list and then writing. Once the scene list is done I’ll probably add to this, but I’ll definitely do it after the first draft is done, but knowing me that could be 10 bloody years away.

16th July

I have a scene list, but I’m no longer happy with how it ends.

I mean Jesus Christ, am I incapable of getting a single story completed?

I think it ends in too dark a place, maybe it’s how I was feeling when I came up with it or maybe it’s just planning for sequels making the original suffer. I know it’s oging to have knock on effects, and I need time to think of how it could end better.

• How can the nest be taken care of after the Rath is gone?
• How can the final fight end if killing the Rath represents the wrong moral message and the guild is shown to be incompetent?

I need to workshop the story with someone, it’s not enough by myself. It needs some proper tender loving care that at the moment I can’t think of. 

I’m going to take a break from this script. In some time I’ll find it and go (hopefully) “oh I could just do this”, but right now I need something else.

I just finished playing Sly 2/3, so I might write a short for those games. Would be fun I reckon. Who knows, maybe the short will branch out into a full script. Maybe my new years resolution of “complete 4 writing projects” will only be failed by 1 project instead of 2, or most likely the shameful 3 that I currently have left to do in less than half a year.

Crikey.