In 2013, one of the music videos going viral across the world was the Russian band Biting Elbows’ ‘Bad Motherf****r’. Directed by the group’s leader Ilya Naishuller, the entire video is shot from a first-person perspective, meaning that the camera is the star. It was like being in a virtual reality video game, but a hyper-violent one where you, the viewer, are in the front and centre of the action, dodging a variety of different attacks. The video drew 33 million eyeballs on YouTube and a further 21 million on Vimeo.
Global critical appreciation was also swift to follow. Naishuller attracted several global celebrity fans, including Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky, Samuel L. Jackson and Night Watch director Timur Bekmambetov. As one does these days, Bekmambetov contacted Naishuller via Facebook and offered to produce a film in the same style of the video. He was as good as his word, and the result is Hardcore Henry . I happened to be in Los Angeles the day the film released and hastened to watch it.
The first 30 minutes of the film are an adrenaline rush. The titular Henry wakes up from a near-death scenario, with no memory of his past life. He has two tasks — to find out his identity and also rescue his wife Estelle, who has been abducted by a warlord. After that first half hour, the film becomes exhausting. The first-person perspective palls and the constantly moving camera, i.e. our point of view, becomes a source of nausea. It is like being stuck inside a videogame on an endless loop.
There are indeed adherents to these kinds of adrenaline thrills, but what really bothered me after a while was that you never see the protagonist because you are the protagonist.
A far better way of getting that adrenaline fix is watching Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s Crank and Crank: High Voltage , where Jason Statham has been injected with poison and he needs to keep his heart rate high if he wants to stay alive. Consequently, he spends both films running around the city, finding innovative ways to stay juiced up. Because you can actually see the protagonist, the audience shares his pain and also the humour, whenever there is a nudge and wink to the camera.
However, the world is embracing virtual reality in a big way, and given the billions invested in Oculus Rift and its competitors and the highly enthusiastic gaming industry, VR versions of events like Hardcore Henry are here to stay. As cinema discovered early on, audiences quickly tire of visceral experiences and love a story. Once stories become a part of these experiences, then we could be in for a wide, wonderful and new form of entertainment. For now, I’m waiting eagerly for the Baahubali Oculus Rift experience.