Robert Rodriguez’s The Limit review: a crazy VR action movie

I love Robert Rodriguez. I like his style in directing movies and I like the emotions that he’s able to foster in me thanks to his movies. That’s why when I heard that he was experimenting with VR I was pretty excited, and that’s why when his first movie “The Limit” has been released, I’ve almost bought it immediately. I just watched it inside my Oculus Rift and I want to tell you my impressions on this crazy VR movie.

The Limit

The Limit is a VR film directed by Robert Rodriguez, written and shot with Robert’s son Racer Max Rodriguez and realized with the help of STX Surreal. The main actress is Michelle Rodriguez and there is also a small part acted by Norman Reedus (that you for sure remember from The Walking Dead). The movie lasts around 20 minutes and the whole experience, including the various extras, will give you around 1 hour of content. The movie is available on Oculus Store, Steam, Viveport for 4.99$.

The setting

When you start the experience, you find yourself inside a small VR cinema, standing behind the last line of seats. In front of you, slightly inclined, there is the main menu of the experience, that lets you choose if watching the video, the trailer, or all the various extras that the experience offers.

I like the fact that there is a 3D environment of the menu, but what I don’t like is that the 2D menu is completely unrelated to the rest of the environment. I think it could have been a smarter choice to embed this menu inside the cinema screen or inside some walls of this environment, or in a cinema ticket that you may have had in your hand. This way, with a 2D interface put in a random position floating in the air, it is a bit immersive-breaking.

The movie

I was in doubt if starting the movie or just wait and watch first all the extras, but then I thought that I couldn’t wait and so I immediately hit the play button. I did a smart choice, because, as I discovered later on, the extras spoil you almost everything of the movie. So I advise you to start by watching the movie and then watching also the other content.

When you hit play, you find yourself seated in the front row of the same cinema of the menu, watching the movie. The movie is not a 360 one, but it has a field of view of around 120 degrees: if you rotate your head behind, you see of course the cinema you’re seated into. This is a smart choice to not break the immersion: in some 180 movies, if you look behind, you see plain black and this is immersive-breaking while seeing the cinema makes everything coherent.

I am a fan of 180 VR against 360 monoscopic because I think that VR should be in 3D. But in this case, this choice has some pros and some cons. The pros are that you can’t watch what you want and so lose some important parts of the action: you can only look forward and so everything just happens in front of you and you won’t miss any detail of the movie. The con is mostly the fact that sometimes you really want to rotate your head: for instance there is a scene where Michelle Rodriguez takes a person and throws him behind you, and so the natural reaction is rotating your head to see where he has landed… but then you rotate your head and you only see the VR cinema. That’s bad for the magic of VR. The non-immersive field of view always reminds you that you are in a cinema watching a movie and you’re not part of the action of the movie.

I can’t spoil the plot to you (but notice that this post will contain some little spoilers), but I will reveal you how the film begins. You are in a bar and you say to Michelle Rodriguez, that is a waitress there, that you want to have a private chat with her. You go in the back with her and you tell her “Max”. She says that Max is dead and she can’t help you in finding him. After that, you return to the bar room with her and there are some armed people. From there on, there will be explosions, car chases, fightings, shootings, a parachute flight and whatever action scene you have always dreamt to live in VR. There are also some crazy scenes of gore in a perfect Robert Rodriguez’s style (if you have ever watched a movie of his, you know what I am talking about): in a scene, for instance, you use a stapler to close a wound that you have on your chest. And there’s also that B-movie touch that Robert Rodriguez loves to give to his movies: for instance there are teeth that fly out of mouths during the fights and Michelle Rodriguez continuously saying “scratch that”. Really amazing, if you like the genre.

The movie is really full of adrenaline: you have a lot of adrenaline scene, with some in-between small talks. If you like strong emotions, then this movie won’t disappoint you and will leave you at the end craving for more. Really, in this movie, I have been kicked off a plane that exploded later on, I’ve been flying without parachutes for some instants, with Michelle Rodriguez next to me. I’ve also punched people in VR, kidnapped an enemy and used him as a human shield while shooting the other ones. There are really lots of scenes like this, lots of scenes that will let you feel like a real badass action movie hero. And apart from the adrenaline, there is also a small plot that unveils slowly during the movie: basically, at half of the movie, you understand who you and Michelle Rodriguez are.

The problem is that shooting scenes with lots of movements, like car chases, are not advised in VR because they can foster motion sickness. But Robert Rodriguez said “scratch that” and implemented all those things that should not be implemented in VR. The director has also made the movie that is not always in first person: there are various scenes that are from a third-person perspective, even with a moving camera, exactly as it happens with traditional movies. There are frequent framing changes and since the movie is not a 360 one, the camera gets rotated to simulate the rotation of the head of your character. This is cool because the movie is not static, but feels more dynamic as traditional movies, but it is bad because all these things go against what a VR storyteller should do to preserve the comfort of the user. Robert Rodriguez has made an awesome job in implementing all the mechanisms that trigger nausea, so the experience is a bit a vomit comet and I feel still nauseous while I’m writing this post.

The sense of immersion is quite high, because the main character, Michelle Rodriguez, continuously acknowledges you about you being part of the movie: she talks with you, interacts with you and this continuously reminds you that you are part of the story. Also the fact that you do things in the movie, like shooting and fighting, make you feel immersed. That’s great: if you don’t rotate your head to see the cinema, you really feel part of the action.

The quality of the movie is very good, even if sometimes there are some wrong proportions of the characters (people seem too big) or even some distortions.

The Extras

I’m usually not the kind of person that watches the extras of a movie, but this time, since I have paid for this experience and I wanted to listen to the opinions of Robert Rodriguez about VR, I watched all of them.

The extras are not bad, because they let you know some behind-the-curtains facts about the movie. Some notable things:

• Robert Rodriguez loves VR because it lets you feel inside the action;
• He was happy about being able to do a movie that was not 360 so that he could direct exactly what the user should see. Furthermore, this way, there were fewer hassles in shooting the movie: in 360 movies, all people of the crew and all machinery have to disappear from the scene and this is limiting;

  

• He used all the possible tricks to make you feel immersed: the fact that Michelle continuously looks into your eyes is one of those. As Baobab studios told at View conference, eye contact with the viewer is a powerful tool to make him/her feel part of the story. The funny part is that at the beginning, Michelle tended to look into the eyes of Racer Max, that was the person impersonating you in the movie and this was a problem because she actually had to look into the camera;
• Michelle Rodriguez was super excited of working in VR and she also contributed in giving ideas for the movie. Robert Rodriguez said that he chose those people of the cast because he wanted passionate people, people that wanted to experiment… not only talented actors;
• Some effects in the movie have been implemented using zoom: when people punch you in the face, there has not been an actor punching the camera, but an actor punching the air and then this scene has been zoomed so that the punch appears as hitting your face;

  

• When there are the first-person action scenes, the ones when you punch enemies, they had to find an original way to do them, because the cameras to shoot this movie are pretty big and so it was impossible for a single person to stay behind this camera and have the left arm coming out on the left and the right arm on the right. So they resorted using two people: there was one person dressed as Racer Max Rodriguez that has been his right arm for the whole movie. The scenes are so fast that you don’t notice that they used this trick;
• Many scenes, like the skydiving and car chase ones, have been made using green screen. This is noticeable in the skydiving one, while in the car chase one, I didn’t notice that…
• Robert Rodriguez says that it is difficult to film stuff in VR, because everything is new, so they had to discover how to do things while they were shooting them. They were not sure of being able to translate the script into an actual movie, it required a lot of trial and error. He feels like a pioneer;
• One of the biggest difficulties of VR is making everything as a single sequence: in the scene with the exploding car, in traditional movies, they would have shot a sequence with just an exploding car and then all the rest in another sequence, and then they would have glued everything together later on. In VR, they had to shoot everything at the same time, without cuts and this is damn hard;

  

• When people say to Robert that he has not to do something, he immediately does that thing. He wants to be the first to do that thing. He wants to underline the problems of a medium instead of hiding them. That’s why he didn’t follow a single piece of advice regarding how to avoid motion sickness. He wanted to take the medium at its extreme;
• Everyone is waiting for next-generation VR and few ones are trying instead to do valuable things with this current generation. This is one of the biggest quotes from R.R. regarding this movie.

Final impressions

If you like Robert Rodriguez, you will like The Limit: it is full of action, full of crazy moments, full of emotions. It is a great experiment of trying to do a movie in VR without following the classical rules. I love people that like experimenting and breaking the rules and so I really appreciated the efforts of the director. And I really loved the adrenaline that is still pumping inside my veins.

But there is a problem and this problem is called “motion sickness”: rules are always there for a reason, and breaking them has a price. This movie is absolutely not a comfortable experience, so watch it at your own risk. I’ve warned you.

The price of $4.99 IMHO is a bit high for just 20 minutes of content, also considering that movies are not fun to be played again and again.

Anyway, I’m not regretting having bought and watched it. It was a fun experience and I’ll let all my colleagues watch it 🙂

And that’s it for my review of The Limit! I hope you have enjoyed it and if it is the case, please subscribe to my newsletter using this fancy form below here 🙂