If you love fantasy, sci-fi, adventure, you know the moment. The starship drifts in over the planet. The alien horizon opens up, all strange light and weather. And some part of you thinks: I want to be in there.
Then the movie moves on. It has to. There's a story to tell, pacing to keep, attention spans to respect. I wouldn't want every film to stop dead for five minutes so I can look around.
But I do want to look around. That's the itch. Not more story. More place.
Think of seeing Earth from orbit on an IMAX screen. It's breathtaking, and then it's gone. The frames start flashing and you're on to the next thing. Beautiful places on a screen are almost always something you're shown rather than something you get to stay in. The camera is always already leaving.
That's a big part of what these runs are for.
What you're signing up for
The format is simple. Twenty minutes, one continuous run through a world that isn't ours. No cuts, no dialogue, no camera tricks. You're on a treadmill anyway. You were going to run regardless. Now there's somewhere to run through.
And while you run, you do what you already do on a run. You look ahead. Around the next bend, over the next rise. What's coming? You wonder about it the way you'd wonder on a real trail, half-watching, maybe with music on, maybe not. Except this trail goes places no trail goes.
Here's the difference, and I think it's the secret: in a film, sitting inside one view for five minutes is dead air. The story can't wait. In a run, the world is the story, and the motion is the plot. Nobody's waiting for a plot point. You get to spend minutes at a time inside a place that doesn't exist.
Movies flash. This one, you get to live in for a while.
— Bryan