In a rather unprecedented move, the producers of the independent action film Hardcore Henry, shot entirely in first person, will premiere the next trailer for their film in a livestreaming event on streaming platform Twitch.
We’ve reached a fascinating place with the next batch of film directors coming up on the independent festival circuit. This next generation of film directors is perhaps the first one that carries the influences of video game cinematography into films – as in not how video games shoot cinematics, but where we place the camera in video games during the action. This sounds absurd, but take a look at this year’s Academy Award nominations. Inside the Best Foreign Language Film category lies the Hungarian film Son Of Saul, a Holocaust drama unique for long sections of the film being shot from a third person, over-the-shoulder perspective not unlike a third person action game, using the perspective to bring you uncomfortably close to the horrors of a concentration camp.
If that makes doesn’t convince you, on account of it being somewhat hard to believe a Holocaust drama takes influence from video game camera movements, perhaps Hardcore Henry would be more convincing. Hardcore Henry is a science-fiction action film shot entirely in first-person, and if you need more proof of its video game bonafides, the next trailer for the film will be premiering on Twitch as part of a special event on February 10th.
The deal was announced today by Hardcore Henry’s producers STX Entertainment, who won the film in a three-way bidding war with Lionsgate and Universal following the film’s premiere at Toronto International Film Festival late last year. The company will be partnering with known Counter-Strike: Global Offensive streamer summit1g’s channel for a two hour event which will include Hardcore’s director Ilya Naishuller and fellow streamers Ms_Vixen, Seltzer, and Force, premiering the film’s next trailer and to answer questions.
Hardcore Henry follows…Henry, a man who is brought back from the dead by his wife with no memory of who he was. His wife is promptly kidnapped by a mysterious warlord, Akan, and Henry is dropped into the unfamiliar streets of Moscow with a great deal of people attempting to kill him and only an English man named Jimmy (District 9 and Powers’ Sharlto Copley) on his side. The film is, seriously, entirely in the first person perspective – an experiment that, the last time it was tried in a video game-like film, it was Doom, and that was widely regarded as awful. Thing is, Hardcore Henry actually released to great acclaim as an action film at TIFF last year. A first person shooter film that actually works?
We’ll see on April 8, Hardcore Henry’s North American release date. In the meantime, you can see the film’s TIFF trailer above (where it was simply titled Hardcore).
