This action movie was shot almost entirely with a GoPro - CNET

All of this is thanks to technology getting cheaper and more manageable. Action cameras like those from GoPro, and similar products from competitors such as Sony, are bringing down the barriers to high-quality filmmaking. Smartphone cameras are getting better too. Apple brags on its billboards that the images there were shot using its latest iPhones.

GoPro didn't immediately retu a request for comment.

For Naishuller, the result of that technology is a real-life video game. Here's a little more about the plot: After an unknown accident, Henry -- or since it's a POV movie, you -- wakes up in a lab, and moments later his scientist wife, Estelle, played by Haley Bennett, screws on a mechanical leg. Henry's been transformed into a super-soldier who's more machine than man. Estelle is then kidnapped by Akan, played by Danila Kozlovsky, a supervillain with Magneto-like telekinetic powers. Henry's only ally is Jimmy, another scientist, played by Sharlto Copley.

From there, we get head-pounding spectacle: flying through the air in a glass escape pod crashing toward the ground (and then the subsequent crash); fighting an army of Jimmys in a secret lab (if I explained why, I'd ruin it); fighting another army of super-soldiers on a roof in pitch-black night (yes, lots of unnamed, cartoonish death here, just like in a video game). Through it all, Naishuller said, Henry is played primarily by three people, including the director himself, but about a dozen actors and stuntmen in all played the character.

The result is not for the squeamish. If the violence, or for that matter, a sometimes misogynistic undertone, doesn't get to you -- it's gorier than a Quentin Tarantino flick -- the camera work might. While innovative, the POV style gets nauseating to watch over the course of an entire film, especially when most of it involves blowing people up or getting blown up.

"We're still trying to figure out where the splash zone is," Copley joked before the movie began. "I think after the first three rows you're OK."

The movie will be released in theaters on April 8 in the US and UK.