PaigeFTW: ‘Hardcore Henry’ and the Future of Gaming in Film
Let’s talk about Hardcore Henry, you and me. I trust you’ve seen it by now, so this is a spoiler zone (though there isn’t much to spoil).
Taken at face value, Hardcore Henry could’ve been a very serviceable if unremarkable FPS. Amnesiac man wakes up in a lab, kills everyone he meets, is betrayed once or thrice, and escapes to an uncertain future. The whole movie is filmed in first person (a true technical achievement, done very well). There are guns, swords and grenades; there’re even health checkpoints.
If you’re a gamer, you can predict all of Hardcore Henry’s major plot points and twists. It’s like walking into a room that has strategic cover — you automatically know in your bones that there’s a firefight coming.
The movie’s downfall, of course, is that it’s all a lot less fun since we’re not actually playing it. Hardcore Henry managed to capture visually the mechanics of a good ol’ FPS, but none of the real spirit of it.
What does this mean for the upcoming video game adaptations in the works — Assassin’s Creed, The Last of Us, Uncharted?
I suspect we’ll see very few allusions to how the games actually play beyond sight gags and occasional nods to significant items and events — none of Hardcore Henry’s winks at avatar regeneration and platforming.
Instead, much of what makes these games great will be presented as wholly removed from the gameplay — and in doing so, they shall be gutted. As lovely as Assassin’s Creed’s cinematics are, assassinations aren’t as fun when you aren’t able to set them up on your own.
Hardcore Henry was the Hollywood experiment with gameplay-as-film and it arguably failed to make much of a mass-appeal splash. Will story alone stand up to the test?
I think not — gaming, after all, holds its appeal in the unification of both elements. Film alone simply cannot match it.
