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Metal Gear Solid Movie Will Embrace The Weird and Supernatural
Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts said at this year's San Diego Comic Con that his upcoming Metal Gear Solid movie will be faithful to its video game roots. Vogt-Roberts, whose most recent work was last year's Kong: Skull Island, has the unenviable task of bringing one of the most popular modern game franchises to the screen. But he has series creator Hideo Kojima's blessing on the project. That is as good an endorsement as fans - and the director - could hope for.
The film hasn't started filming yet; it's unclear exactly what the story is about or who will even star in it. But Vogt-Roberts recently revealed the script was finished, so progress is being made on the project, which is something he's undoubtedly excited about. And in his recent comments, he gave fans some more reasons to look forward to seeing Metal Gear Solid come to theaters.
Speaking to Screen Rant at San Diego Comic-Con, Jordan Vogt-Roberts discussed his plans for the Metal Gear Solid movie, including embracing all the weird elements that make the games great and memorable for fans - and that includes the supernatural:
"You know the beauty of Metal Gear and the reason I give our producers and the studio a ton of credit is because I went in and said, 'Let's embrace the fact that this is weird.' Let's embrace the fact that there are supernatural elements to this game that are horror elements to this game. Let's embrace the fact that there are weird Japanese quirkiness and idiosyncrasies and oddities that are all framed around this very self-serious world and let's lean into those things and let's have it be unique and unlike anything else because it represents those things and let's have the rest of the world fall in love with it because of that as opposed to trying to make it something else."
The first Metal Gear game came out in 1997, but the film will presumably be based on 1998's Metal Gear Solid for the original PlayStation. The video game's plot has Solid Snake infiltrating an Alaskan base and battling the colorful members of an elite terrorist group. These include the clairvoyant Psycho Mantis, who confounded players by identifying games from their memory cards. He was also impossible to defeat thanks to his mind-reading abilities, which players overcame by plugging their controllers into a different port on the console.
This is the kind of weird stuff that Vogt-Roberts is referring to. While it may not mean Deadpool-style metagags like in the games, it does show that the director and screenwriter aren't sticking to the straightforward parts of the plot. This is potentially great news for fans who want to see a live-action version of the Cyborg Ninja character, who is exactly what the name suggests and slaughters an entire squad of soldiers while invisible in one of MGS's most memorable scenes.
News of a Metal Gear Solid film adaptation first emerged in 2006, when Kojima announced the deal. David Hayter, who provides the voice of Snake in the series and had a writing credit on the first X-Men film in 2000, submitted a script, but producers rejected it. Not much news has emerged about the movie since, other than that it was still in development. But over the past couple years, the project has locked in a new production company, Vogt-Roberts as director, and screenwriter Jay Basu, who is also writing the upcoming sequel to Jim Henson's classic Labyrinth. Hopefully, things continue to progress smoothly behind the scenes and fans can finally get the Metal Gear Solid movie they've always wanted to see.
