Ready for the World’s First GoPro Movie? You Might Just Puke!

Watching ‘Hardcore Henry’ may give you nausea and make you dizzy

A poster of Hardcore Henry 

Hardcore Henry is the world’s first film shot entirely on GoPro and it enters theatres in India on April 8. But, first things first. What exactly is GoPro?

Answer: GoPro cameras give you a first person perspective of any activity. They were developed to film extreme action. So if you strap a GoPro camera to a surfboard and hit some pretty rough waves, it would record the action and images to give you a subjective view of what it would be like to be on that surfboard.

So seeing an entire film shot on GoPro is like virtually becoming the actual protagonist of the film yourself. It’s akin to playing one of those First Person Shooter (FPS) video games like Doom wherein the action on the screen is from your Point Of View (POV).

I made a few GIFs from Hardcore Henry to illustrate how exactly the GoPro feel translates on screen (wait a few seconds for the GIFs to load) :

Get the picture? So that’s 1 hour 35 minutes of a film that you see completely from the protagonist’s POV. Can you stomach that? With all that movement, many viewers may feel sick, nauseous and dizzy but according to Deadline.com, “the crowd at the Paramount theater ate it up, cheering every dismemberment, every broken limb, every mutilation, every comical murder as if they were seeing the film’s first instance of them.”

But check out an entry in the comments section:

So how exactly is a complete movie shot on GoPro? The makers create a cage mount for their GoPro camera which is designed to fit over a stand-in’s head to get the protagonists POV. All the action is choreographed and rehearsed to perfection for that perfect shot which is captured in first person perspective.

Hardcore Henry is touted as the world’s first film shot entirely on a GoPro camera. It’s directed by Russian writer-director Ilya Naishuller and the plot revolves around Henry, who’s brought back to life as a cybernetic super soldier, trying to save his wife, who’s been kidnapped by a powerful warlord with a huge army of soldiers. Essentially it is a first person shooter (FPS) game blown up into a full feature film.

I felt dizzy just watching the trailer, take a look and decide if you want to watch this cinematic event as the film releases in India next month.