I am sure many of you have seen the commercials or heard some of the buzz surrounding the new movie “Hardcore Henry.” It is an action adventure movie about a man fighting the people who made him into cyborg and kidnapped his wife, but the kicker is that the film is shot all in the first person perspective, making it feel like you are the main character. Many have compared it to essentially living a video game. I found this very interesting because it is the first movie to have ever done this and it crosses that line that we are accustomed too. There used to be a concrete theme of how things were done but the lines have become blurred and video games are becoming movies and movies become video games. There are examples like Defiance or Quantum Break which are video games, but have TV shows that play alongside them and help further the story. As we become more advanced, where will the next step of blurring the lines between different mediums be?
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MIT 2155 
I actually watched this movie last night and was actually quite disappointed. I’m always down for a good action movie and I’ve always been obsessed with superhero movies and James Bond so I was eager to see the movie. I also thought it was insanely cool that it was shot with GoPro cameras strapped to the heads of the stuntmen who played Henry.
I admit my idea of a cool video game is something like RockBand where you don’t really need a controller. I grew up with a GameCube and Wii so I never quite got the hang of Xbox and Playstation controllers. First-person shooter games were not popular in my house as I had no brothers and none of my sisters were into gaming (hence the Wii). The attraction of Hardcore Henry is that we (the audience) is Henry. Everything in the movie is seen strictly from his (our) POV. Watching this movie didn’t really feel like watching a movie, it felt like watching someone else play a typical first-person shooter game.
Henry doesn’t speak, we never see his face like most characters in first-person shooter games. Action sequences function as levels. You get a couple minutes of exposition explaining Henry’s immediate goal followed by a lengthy sequence of frenetic violence as he completes that goal. Repeat. And repeat. And repeat. In a typical video game structure such as this is typically just accepted as a necessary thing, but there’s a reason movies usually don’t work that way. It’s not a good way to tell a story or develop characters. They do it in games because the “playing” part is inherently prioritized over the storytelling. They want it to be fun and compelling to play, first and foremost. Even most action-heavy movies, on the other hand, are largely about people talking to each other. Filmmakers want you to care about the characters and what they’re doing. Character development aids in suspension of disbelief for the viewer, and a big plot twist is only as effective as the steps a story took to get there.
“Hardcore Henry” manages to be the product of those fundamental difference between the two types of media. It has the economy of a movie at 96 minutes long, but all the storytelling aspirations of a game. For me, the novelty of “Hardcore Henry” wore off very quickly. By the end I was just bored, because I didn’t care about Henry or what he was doing.
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