Authors of the review bombing are mainly Chinese users and the reason for this generalized gesture seems to be connected to a bad taste detail discovered within the Monster Hunter film, as explained on Twitter by market analyst Daniel Ahmad. >
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The reason for this hatred would therefore be an unfortunate joke present in a clip of the film shot by Paul WS Anderson, which takes up a sort of pun present in English: in the exchange of lines visible in the video reported in the tweet, we see the two characters saying "What kind of knees are these?" "Chi-knees".
The play on words is based on the proximity of sound between "knees", meaning "knees" and "chinese", meaning Chinese. It doesn't really make much sense even in the original language but it is absolutely incomprehensible how such a joke could have been inserted into a film, since it can easily be taken as a phrase with a racist tone, also because, as explained by Ahmad, it is often associated to the expression "Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees - look at these?" which is used to make fun of people of Asian descent.
Some comments in the negative reviews given to Monster Hunter: World explicitly say it: "Good game, lousy racist movie", reads one, for example.
The situation is almost nonsense, all in all: on the one hand the introduction of such a joke in a modern cinematic film is unspeakable, which moreover should focus strongly on the Asian audience, considering the success achieved from Monter Hunter over there. On the other hand, the fact of pouring negative reviews on the Capcom video game, which otherwise remains a great title, does not seem a particularly logical action.
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