Exit 8 is cinema for the livestreaming era

The rules of Exit 8both the cult indie game and the recent film adaptation, are simple: you’re stuck in a subway station that runs in an endless loop. If you notice anomalies on your current loop, you turn around. If everything is the same, you keep moving forward. Each successful attempt takes you to a new entrance where the loop repeats, until you reach the end of the maze, Exit 8 itself.

It’s a setup that’s ideal for a first-person video game, where you can completely control where your character looks and moves. And this is also something that director Genki Kawamura skillfully reproduces in the film through long tracking shots and rapid camera movements. Even without a controller, keyboard or mouse, the viewer remains immersed, searching and listening for minor changes. In just a few minutes, the film makes it clear that this isn’t just another mindless video game adaptation like The Mario Galaxy movie — it’s an attempt to translate the gaming experience to an entirely new medium.

It’s a tall order for most artists, but Kawamura is no stranger to jumping between formats. He is known for producing popular anime films like Makoto Shinkai and Mamoru Hosoda, including Your name And Beautiful. He has also made a name for himself as a best-selling author, with books including the novelization of Exit 8.

Kawamura’s take on the film came from a conversation with legendary Nintendo game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, who had mentioned that the greatest games are fun for both the players and the people watching them. “So what I tried to do in the film is really put the audience in the player’s shoes in some shots…almost like they’re watching a live stream of a video game in other scenes,” he said in an interview with Engadget (via a translator). “It’s a bit structurally the common thread of the film.”

THE Exit 8 the adaptation balances this feeling of immersion with a more traditional narrative structure, something the game was completely lacking. At the beginning of the film, we are introduced to a young man standing on a crowded train. A drunk businessman yells at a mother to quiet her crying baby. Instead of telling the belligerent employee to fuck off, the young man plugs in his headphones and tries to ignore the situation, like everyone else. He eventually walks away, while the tearful mother suffers from the verbal assault.

It’s a scene that anyone who has lived in a crowded city can relate to: the moments when you know you should try to help a stranger, but fear, cowardice, or embarrassment holds you back.

Shortly after receiving a call from his ex-girlfriend, who reveals that she is pregnant, the young man falls into the loop of Exit 8. At first, it is just a normal subway station, with large advertising posters, a photo booth and random maintenance doors. But he quickly notices that the play is repeating itself. Thanks to a helpful set of instructions on the wall, he learns that his only way out is to start tracking anomalies, like slight changes in text or the way a robotic businessman walks past him. And yes, things get weird quickly.

Kawamura points to his experience working in the field of animation as a major influence for Exit 8. In particular, the works of Satoshi Kon and Katsuhiro Otomo influenced the way he externalized what characters thought and felt, as well as the way he depicted the interaction between the dream and real worlds.

“During filming, I told my cinematographer [director of photography] that the main character in this movie is the hallway,” he said. “And all of our human characters don’t have names, so they’re NPCs in that hallway, which is the main character. So I wanted the hallway to almost evoke this feeling in the audience that they have their own will. And that yellow Exit 8 sign almost looks like this divine God-like being. »

Kawamura says he personally sees it as a corridor challenging humans who have a guilty conscience, but you can easily read it in other ways. Most importantly, Exit 8 isn’t simply a faithful recreation of the source material – it adds enough to warrant the existence of a separate medium, a challenge that many video game adaptations fail to achieve.