The Brazilian filmmaker Alexandre Alonso’s Hunter is a film with a lot of ideas, but with not as much holding those ideas together. I’ve watched only a few dozen short films in my long history as a movie lover, so I’m not an expert in this type of medium. Perhaps its meaning might’ve escaped me, and cinephiles who have developed a strong taste for the unusual and experimental way it was made will thoroughly enjoy it.
The first thing that bothered me was the title. A film called Hunter makes you wonder who the hunter is, what exactly he hunts, and why. But the protagonist’s motivation never becomes clear enough for the title to have a meaning related to what happens in the movie. He has an accident on Earth, and then, almost without warning, we are in outer space. Suddenly there is a planet called Orion, a powerful creature, spaceships, a group of wise aliens, and a mission.
The jump itself from one place to another isn’t necessarily the problem. Science fiction can take you anywhere. The problem is that in this 8-minute short film, there is not much really connecting these places together. The car accident doesn’t seem to lead naturally into the space story, and the space story doesn’t give us much information about the person we are following.
That pattern continues with the woman on the spaceship and the group of aliens. They arrive with information the audience is expected to accept without much context. Why is the woman there? Why is this particular group of aliens discussing the fate of Orion with our protagonist? How did he become part of this situation? Perhaps that is left open to viewer interpretation. The film keeps moving forward before any of those questions have been given enough attention.
The protagonist’s powers make this even more noticeable. Early on, he is running away from spaceships. Later, he suddenly has extremely powerful, anime-style abilities and can deal with enemies almost effortlessly. The anime influence itself isn’t an issue. In fact, it is one of the things that makes the concept interesting. But those abilities need to feel like they belong to the same character we met earlier. Instead, they add to the feeling that the rules of the film are changing from scene to scene.
The same thing happens visually. The protagonist moves between an elaborate space costume and a regular T-shirt, sometimes with a helmet and sometimes without one. The sound levels and ambient audio also shift noticeably from one scene to the next. None of these things would necessarily ruin an otherwise strong short, but here they reinforce the same problem the script already has: nothing feels connected to what came before.
And that is unfortunate, because there is clearly imagination behind Hunter. The combination of science fiction and anime has potential, and some of the imagery shows how far Alonso wants to take the idea. There is a genuine sense of someone trying to build a much bigger world than the resources of a short film might normally allow. But the film sometimes seems more interested in introducing the next cool thing than in asking what the previous one means.
This is where the use of AI becomes particularly noticeable. Generative tools can make it possible to put spaceships, creatures, and alien environments on screen without a huge production budget. That is exciting. But a striking image still needs a reason to be there. Otherwise, the film starts to feel like a collection of impressive imagery rather than a story. Even the ending falls into this problem. There is a difference between wondering what a film means and wondering what just happened.
Hunter has plenty of ambition, and Alonso clearly has enthusiasm for the world he is trying to create. What seems to be missing is the structure that would allow all those ideas to become one story. The film doesn’t need fewer aliens, powers, spaceships, or creatures. It needs a reason for them all to belong in the same movie.
