Ever since husky-voiced super soldier Solid Snake first scubaed out of the water and strangled a guard and there were credits coming up on the screen whilst you were playing like, what, does this game thinks it’s a movie or something?, the Metal Gear Solid franchise has screamed out “Adapt me cinematically! Adapt me cinematically!”
That’s no huge surprise, given that Hideo Kojima – the nice Japanese man who came up with far-out ideas like “dedicated sniper woman” and “nerdish man urinating in locker” – is a monumental film geek and went about channelling his cinematic fetishes into the very backbone of these brilliant games. Kojima even based Snake’s physique on that of Jean Claude Van Damme. And his face was moulded with state of the art PSone graphics to look sort of like Christopher Walken. That’s serious trivia, folks.
But time has moved on, and with it the Metal Gear franchise: what began as a nice pixelated stealth shooter in the NES era has spawned a bunch of sequels, a monumental fanbase, and a huge story arc that borders the insane. And the complication levels have really risen, too, since Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (released in 2001) became the first real meta-game and kind of gave you a hard time about, you know, not turning off your console and cutting people up with samurai swords.
So it’s great to hear that Columbia Pictures have officially announced that Metal Gear Solid: The Movie is in the works. “What’s the best way to approach such a complex set of games?” is one important question that the writers might be facing this very second, and, “Oh, God, what have we got ourselves into?” is another. Whilst we’ll leave all those tough decisions to the capable guys who signed the obliging contractual agreements, it’s time to speculate on who should take the reigns for these super Japanese games.
Note: For the sake of it, we’re going to throw caution to the wind and outright assume that the Metal Gear Solid game from 1998 is the basis for this adaptation.
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2 Comments
The only thing i can see being a major problem for the adaptation, besides casting of course, is the codec calls, especially the important plotline ones. I think that will be difficult to put onto the big screen efficiently.
Get Kurt Wimmer to direct it and the Wachowskis to write the screenplay.
Then the movie can’t go wrong.