Bungie hired an Oscar winner to make Marathon's stunning 8-minute short, but only real sci-fi nerds will spot the cult movie that inspired it
Bungie finished today's Marathon gameplay reveal stream with a surprise treat: An eight-minute animation that sets the scene for the game's lore, and specifically how brutal life is for runners seeking to make their fortune on Tau Ceti IV. Or, more specifically, their frequent, repeated deaths.
I actually saw the short just over a week ago at Bungie's Seattle office as part of a two-day playtest—which you can read about here—and it's honestly the best one of these I've seen from a game in a long time. (Watch it below.)
Credit for the quality goes to Alberto Mielgo, a director who won the Best Animated Short Film Oscar for The Windshield Wiper in 2021. Since then, he's also won five Emmys, including for his work writing, designing and directing two episodes of Netflix's 'Love, Death and Robots' series.
(Hey, maybe not everyone at Bungie got the memo from Sony about keeping budgets under control?)
Death certainly features heavily in the Marathon short, as we watch runners transfer their consciousnesses into cybernetic 3D bodies to go scavenging around Tau Ceti's IV's abandoned colony. Life expectancy is shown to be startlingly short, with runners swiftly coming to gory (but stylish) ends.
After each death, their psyche returns to their actual host body, where they are then shown several objects of emotional importance from their past and asked whether they recognise them, with the idea being that this process anchors them back to their real bodies. The process works a bit like baseline calibration scenes from Bladerunner 2049, but that's not the true inspiration.
As soon as I saw the scene, I knew where the idea had been lifted from: A brilliant but obscure sci-fi thriller called Possessor, directed by Brandon Cronenberg and released in 2020, who as you've probably guessed is the son of David Cronenberg, the guy who practically invented the body horror genre.
In that movie, the always excellent Andrea Riseborough plays a corporate assassin who hijacks the mind of someone close to her target, makes the kill, then jumps back to her original body. One of the core conceits in the movie is that if you spend too much time inside your temporary body, your own identity starts to degrade and get lost, intermingling with the host persona.
To prevent that, after each mission, the assassin is shown—you've guessed it—several objects with emotional resonance from her childhood and asked to recall them. It's basically repeated verbatim in the Marathon short, and when I approached the Bungie devs at the event to ask if they'd seen Possessor they acknowledged the film is one of many inspirations. Honestly, anything which gets more people to watch Possessor is fine by me. But be warned: it's not for the squeamish.
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Marathon animated short: Bungie hired an Oscar winner to make a pretty ad