HARDCORE HENRY: An ACTUAL Video Game Movie
Forget Uncharted. This is a real video game movie.
The bulk of this essay is sourced from one of two senior thesis papers I wrote in film school. I think Hardcore Henry remains a criminally underappreciated film, and so I can't resist the opportunity to share some of those thoughts here. Hopefully you can forgive the academic tone.
The "Video Game" Movie
In 1993, Buena Vista Pictures released Super Mario Bros.: The Movie to abysmal box office ratings and (somehow) even worse reviews. This was the first coincidence of Hollywood and the burgeoning world of gaming, and was alas a grim portent for their future marriages. Although box office success has varied wildly, from Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001, dir. Simon West) to Doom (2005, dir. Andrzej Bartkowiak) and the Resident Evil franchise (2002-present), Super Mario Bros.’s legacy of poor reception has proven unshakable.
Given this sampling, it would not be outrageous to claim these two mediums have a mixed history with one another. But video games have come a long way since Mario was on the NES, and while direct adaptations continue to prove unsuccessful, gaming has slowly seeped its way into the public conscience, and an indirect kind of video game movie—one that alludes to interactive fiction but is not based on existing properties—has emerged.
Such a film is Hardcore Henry (2015, writ. & dir. by Ilya Naishuller).
Henry: The Film
Hardcore Henry was independently financed and filmed using consumer-grade GoPro cameras1 in the Russian Federation. It is primarily noteworthy as one of only a few movies ever shot entirely from a first-person perspective—intentionally in the style of a First-Person Shooter (FPS) video game.
Yet despite this conspicuous style, what makes Hardcore Henry so remarkable is that it represents the first time the storytelling logic of gaming has entered into filmmaking; and it is this intense reliance on the logic of the FPS genre, combined with its immensely Russian setting, that makes Hardcore Henry such an interesting film—and accounts for its lackluster box office success.
Video Game Exterior, Hollywood Interior
Upon Hardcore Henry’s release (henceforth “HH”), critics noticed the obvious parallels with gaming.2 These parallels were intentional, as director Ilya Naishuller has specified multiple times since.3 The film is 90 minutes long and almost entirely action. Its first-person camerawork, in which eponymous protagonist Henry parkours across Moscow rooftops, leans around corners, reloads firearms, and wreaks havoc, is impossible not to compare to the experience of observing gameplay from a science fiction FPS such as Halo: Combat Evolved (2001).
On a superficial level HH eschews character development and overt thematic purpose in favor of mindless action, a quality no doubt ascribable to most shooters. This is a film that revels in its violence. Although there is a story, most viewers will conclude that the spectacle of the carnage is itself the main purpose. Professional critics often criticized the narrative, and the characters especially, as shallow.4
This criticism is unfair.
Although it is undeniable that HH is more about action than story, and indeed as much an experiment in style as work of art, it is neither the form of the narrative nor the unusualness of its first-person cinematography that makes the film unconventional.
Filmmaking
Analyze this film's screenplay and notice how well it conforms to classical three-act narrative structure:
Henry wakes up in a laboratory. Five minutes later, that lab is invaded by Akan, the primary antagonist. This is our inciting incident.
Henry ditches the laboratory and ends up on the streets of Moscow, left fleeing pursuers until the end of the first act. At this point, approximately thirty minutes into the film, the first imminent threat—that he is running out of power—is resolved, and the goal shifts to rescuing his captured wife Estelle.
Precisely at the film’s midpoint, 00:45:00, he finds his wife, only to run into Akan for the first time since the inciting incident. He wins the subsequent fight at the clear lowpoint of the narrative, and this lowpoint is placed precisely at where Save the Cat (or any other Hollywood writers’ guide) would demand.
Here the action continues to climb until the beginning of the third act, which is demarked by Henry’s meeting up with the real body of Jimmy and his subsequent shift in goal: help Jimmy take down Akan before Akan activates his army of cyborg supersoldiers. This third act comes at precisely where it ‘should,’ with thirty minutes runtime remaining.
This is all standard procedure for narrative cinema.
What stands out most of all from HH’s story structure is that there is even a twist in the third act, which serves to recontextualize the entire film—Estelle’s betrayal, and the realization that she was always Akan’s tool.
It is true that this plot is more of a framework for the action than an important story to be told in and of itself. It is not an amazing drama. But crafting a film in which the classical Hollywood beats are hit as precisely as they are in Hardcore Henry is no small feat, and one that many large budget blockbusters fail to do as well as is accomplished here by Naishuller.
Throughout the film, too, bear witness to something very strange relative to video games: editing. Naishuller regularly edits out downtime, such as walking, in a way that video games cannot and do not ever do. These edits are concealed as ‘glitching’ in Henry’s optical servos, but we all know that eliding downtime without conflict is simply a convention of cinema. It is what must be done. And because HH is still a movie at its stylistic core—and not a game—it complies to these conventions, just as does its story.
Cinematic Form, Interactive Content
The true connections between HH and gaming are therefore much more complicated than visual style or plot structure. Any other action film could be shot in first-person, but it would not be a video game film in the way that HH so completely is. To explain this point, the content of the narrative needs to be carefully analyzed.
Consider the opening sequence. Henry wakes up with amnesia and receives his cybernetic augmentations. Seem familiar?
If it does, that might be because it's taken directly out of the original Halo. From darkness fades in a sci-fi laboratory, all from first-person, and a technician runs diagnostics to bring the character online. The audience gazes downward upon an unfamiliar body.
While this similarity may be ultimately coincidental, it shows one way in which Naishuller reaches video game conclusions to narrative problems throughout Hardcore Henry—such as establishing the physical body of the Point of View character and reminding us that he is a more than a floating GoPro.
Amnesia
What cannot be explained away as coincidence is the narrative’s deliberate use of amnesia. Amnesiac protagonists are not entirely foreign to cinema—Memento (2000, dir. Christopher Nolan) comes to mind—but are a particular staple of gaming.
The reasons for this, as I've discussed elsewhere, are obvious: amnesia allows for a complete reset within the mind of the protagonist. It places the player and the character on the exact same level. More than permitting easy exposition, it alleviates dissonance that the player might feel while inhabiting someone else’s body. It creates cohesion between narrative and gameplay. Examples abound, most notably Planescape: Torment (1999), Disco Elysium (2019) and Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001). Amnesia is a staple of video game storytelling and it is also at the core of Hardcore Henry.
A Comparative Analysis with BioShock
Released in 2007, BioShock was and remains today critically acclaimed for its narrative. In many ways it and Hardcore Henry tell the same story: an amnesiac supersoldier, robbed of all agency, performs violent tasks in the pursuit of reuniting with a loved one. Ultimately, both stories see the protagonist’s puppetmaster revealed to be a manipulative villain, and both end with a “final boss” encounter that sees the puppetmaster brutally killed.
BioShock, as a game, tells us a great deal about personal agency; that is its thematic purpose, and it cultivates this lack of agency through its interactivity.
HH is a movie. It cannot utilize interactivity, or lack thereof, to make a point about agency. It can only utilize gaming’s narrative conventions to tell its story. This is exactly what the film does.
This is also why the film is so often criticized for its shallow characterization (of Henry in particular) by mainstream film critics,5 who themselves may not be familiar with conventions like amnesia which are so precisely and frequently deployed in gaming.
HH replicates this precision. It intentionally eschews establishing Henry as a character until the end, because Henry is not a character until he is free from Akan’s influence. He is a puppet for the other characters until his decision to kill Estelle in the last five seconds of the film. Had Henry been developed more thoroughly, the film’s third act twist, which is lifted directly out of BioShock (among other games--Metal Gear Solid 2 most obviously), would not be nearly so effective. It is deliberate that his development is backloaded.
But critics were right in so far that this is unconventional. Films are not generally written this way, with protagonists that are so lacking in agency and so deliberately devoid of characterization. We are expected to understand the video game convention of amnesia and accept that Henry is a stand-in for the audience, rather than an inherently engaging dramatic character. Few without the context of having played BioShock or Half-Life will appreciate this technique.
The Silent Protagonist
As a final demonstration of HH’s narrative ties to gaming, I want to call attention to Henry’s silence. His vocal chord systems are never brought online, so his voice is never heard at any point in the film. He has no dialogue. This is one of the FPS’ most distinctive narrative conventions. BioShock, Halo, and most other shooters have ‘silent protagonists,’ characters who never speak in gameplay sequences.
This makes sense in a game. I, the player, am the protagonist. I exist within the lead character’s head. To hear another person’s voice issue from his mouth is jarring and distracting.
Movies do not have this problem.
Even in Hardcore Henry, while we might see Henry’s perspective, we do not drive the action, and so there is no obvious reason why Henry shouldn’t speak when spoken to. Naishuller goes further than he needs to in giving this a diegetic explanation in the story, but the real reason why Henry is silent is, of course, because the film’s content is modeled after gaming. It would be strange indeed if this monolithic convention of the FPS was disobeyed in a ‘video game’ movie.
This is perhaps the most important quality of HH in making the narrative feel like a game.
To understand why Henry is presented the way he is, to understand these filmmaking choices, one needs the context of gaming, and it is unsurprising that reception tended toward the negative where that context was missing. Those with proper context, such as the gaming website IGN, appreciated what HH was going for more than cinema-exclusive film critics.6
In a sense this is a failing on Naishuller’s part: perhaps HH takes its ‘gameyness’ too far and tells a story that cannot stand on its own.
From Russia Without Subtitles
To leave its ties to gaming momentarily aside, Hardcore Henry’s uniqueness, and the reason for its lackluster commercial success, is demonstrated by one further factor: the film is Russian, and it shows.
HH may be among one of the most Russian films ever given a wide released in the United States.
Ironically, most of the film is in English; it is only the antagonists who speak Russian (which is presented only sometimes in subtitles), but this is ultimately unimportant. Russian culture pervades nearly every scene of this film.
Naishuller was personally responsible for much of the camerawork and shot in a ‘guerilla’ style,7 and this provides an unmitigated glimpse into reallife in Moscow. The buildings are ugly and Soviet, the apartments dirty and cramped, and the cars aging and European.
We visit a club and brothel of a kind that pervades the Muscovite nightlife and romp through a desolate and crumbling Communist-era ‘hotel’ in the leadup to the film’s third act.8
But undoubtedly most alienating for Americans are the people themselves: every character and every extra is white, and huge percentages blond. They make Russian jokes (“You know the problem with Mother Russia? Too goddamn hot.”), speak Russian, shave their heads, behave thuggishly, and wear tracksuits of a kind that only Eastern Europeans ever would. These sorts of distinctively Slavic characters, from whom Henry steals clothes in the first act, are prolific enough to even have their own subcultural name in Russia—“gopota,” or gopniks in English.
If you've ever seen a Slav squatting, that's a Gopnik.
But above all, the police are corrupt and the military always nearby. Toward the end of the film a soldier asks Henry for a lighter, then decides to keep it after his cigarette is lit. This in particular may seem like a strictly cinematic scene to Americans, but harassment, coercion, and the ever-present armed forces are unfortunately frequent experiences throughout the former USSR.
With this extreme Russianness oozing everywhere from Hardcore Henry, we can come to understand why Eastern European critics far, far preferred the film to Americans.9 In fact, they loved it.
Conclusory Remarks
Hardcore Henry applies gaming conventions of character and narrative onto a generally classical Hollywood format. Its greatest failing is its apparent inability to bridge the gap between the expectations of moviegoers and film aficionados with the narrative conventions of the video games it so deliberately seeks to homage.
But that, along with its supremely un-American setting, is what makes it so interesting and unique: most video game movies are simply video games turned into movies. It’s no surprise that their reputation is one of poor quality, because games have storytelling conventions dissimilar to those of film.
Hardcore Henry is different. Hardcore Henry is a movie that is a video game. And although that certainly guarantees a small audience, I believe the film Naishuller gave us to be far more interesting for those of us who love both interactive and non-interactive storytelling than any true, mainstream video game franchise cinematic adaptation could ever hope to be.
Notes
1. Bishop, Bryan. “The making of Hardcore Henry, the craziest first-person action movie you’ll ever see.” The Verge, 16 Mar. 2016. https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/16/11248318/hardcore-henry-gopro-movie-director-interview-sxsw-2016.
2. “Half in the Bag Episode 107: Hardcore Henry.” RedLetterMedia, ft. Mike Stoklasa and Jay Bauman. 14 Apr. 2016. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ioit5DWsWsw.
3. “Hardcore Henry Interview with Sharlto Copley and Ilya Naishuller.” Dread Central, 20 Mar. 2016, Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VD6MN4yRVpI; Bishop.
4. Pile, Jonathan. “Hardcore Henry Review.” Empire Online, 13 Apr. 2016. https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/hardcore-henry-review/; RedLetterMedia.
5. Kenny, Glenn. “Review: In ‘Hardcore Henry,’ a Semi-Robotic Soldier Has a Personal Mission.” The New York Times, 7 Apr. 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/08/movies/review-in-hardcore-henry-a-semi-robotic-soldier-has-a-personal-mission.html; Abrams, Simon. “Hardcore Henry.” RogerEbert.com, 8 Apr. 2016. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/hardcore-henry-2016; Pile.
6. Nicholson, Max. “Hardcore Henry – Review.” IGN, 14 Mar. 2016. https://in.ign.com/hardcore-henry/89440/review/hardcore-henry-review; Kamen, Matt. “How Hardcore Henry steals gaming's best tricks for film.” Wired Magazine, 5 Apr. 2016. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/hardcore-henry-director-interview.
7. Kamen.
8. For an in-depth analysis of post-Soviet Russian culture, particularly police corruption and the military, I highly recommend Darkness at Dawn by David Satter. His portrait of the Russian Federation is one HH confirms, particularly the nightclub sequence.
9. “Hardcore Henry.” Kritikanstvo. https://kritikanstvo.ru/movies/hardcorehenry.