It's unfortunate Josh Holloway didn't seem to wanna be a big thing and turned down a shit ton of roles while he was still hot coming off Lost, I always thought he had the perfect look for Snake.

Oscar Isaac will do fine though, great actor...a little short, but no biggie.

@finaldasa: Really difficult to pull off as cinema, but to stay really true to the subject matter, it would have to try to juggle both.

Thus it would have to include the hair trigger bowels of Johnny...

Well, perhaps not.

Isaac is stupidly fucking talented and a literal chameleon. he is a tiny colourful lizard playing a man playing other men. It's wild.

My worry is that the movie will lose out on the meta of the games. Aside from MGS1, all of the MGS games have existed as commentary on not only the world in which they were made but also about the act of playing those games. MGS2 is a game almost entirely about how impossible it is to recreate the insane success of MGS1. Phantom Pain's entire emotional crux is based on introducing a wickedly-broken support character and then taking them away. I don't think a movie will be inherently bad but adapting a property that owes so much to the mechanics of playing it will be incredibly difficult. I think Kojima is awful at telling a story, but he is really talented when it comes to conveying emotion through gameplay. Death Stranding is some of the worst, most pretentious, egregiously terrible storytelling I have ever encountered but the moment-to-moment of playing as Sam and traversing the landscape and building structures and using things other people have built is revelatory.

@the_nubster: I’m a bit of a Kojima hater, but some of the stuff you wrote here is pretty compelling and makes me want to rethink some aspects of his games.

You can cram some of the games into 90 minute movies because of the tight deadlines of the games, as well. 24 hours to stop a nuclear launch? Deal. One thing that worries me is the starting point, though. Metal Gear Solid is the one that holds the most hearts and minds but, pick that story and you have to explain what a Metal Gear is and why it's feared.

Areas like that is where creative license is welcomed, to me.

I like all his roles but he was a dick to me and my coworkers at my restaurant so I hope they go with someone who doesn't have Tom Cruise complex

Your point is valid, the games have a lot of meta stuff about games. I don't think it's impossible to make a good MGS movie, but like any good film adaptation, they have to only carry over the absolute essentials of the story and then just focus on making a good film. Where adaptations get into trouble is when they try to include like EVERY single moment and scene, even moments/scenes that only work well in the context of the original medium. Like, there's no way a film version of Psycho Mantis can read your memory card, so don't even try (at best maybe Mantis could be the only character to break the 4th wall and speak to the audience, but even this would be way too hard to get right and end up awful). If Psycho Mantis is in the MGS film, have him do something else entirely.

Adaptations that work well: screenwriters know how to adapt novels and short stories into film. Sometimes they significantly rework the substance of the story, but ultimately the pacing of a 90-120 film is very different compared to a 200-800 page book that has days or weeks of your time to gradually get somewhere. You have to change things. Plays/musicals can also generally make the transition if the screenwriter knows what they're doing.

Adaptations that sometimes don't work well: I think screenwriters are still figuring out more tonally serious graphic novels. Like the Watchmen film slavishly includes most of the scenes from the novel, but those scenes work much better in graphic novel form in many cases due to how the visual techniques of the medium let you have an impactful moment. It's the same dialogue, but it has a different feel when accompanying 10-20 comic panels capturing an instant in time versus 90 seconds of continuous video. Also that film kinda celebrates the violence in action sequences in a way the novel doesn't, so I have overall tonal issues with the film. For a more recent example, a Marie Curie movie came out in the past year called Radioactive, and I've read that it was based on a graphic novel. I haven't read it, but as I watched the film, I found there are very visual-based sequences that land just kind of OK in the film, but I imagine would be carefully composed in the graphic novel for a much stronger visual impression. It was an OK movie, but I'm intrigued to check out the graphic novel. Notable exception to my complaints: the Scott Pilgrim movie seems to be generally well liked, despite the graphic novels being pretty unusual fare when it comes to comic book adaptations.

Adaptations that seem like they usually work out: screenwriters can do adaptations of dumb as hell video games/superhero comic books, where they don't sweat the details. Mortal Kombat 1 is little more than a premise and some character designs, and that's all the movie needed to be a tolerable martial arts movie. The superhero movies are successful because at best they import the general origin story of 1 or more characters, but otherwise tell an original story, or one that is a very loose retelling of a comic book storyline. I think where they run into big trouble is when they do try to closely recreate some storyline. I think the Dark Knight Rises tries too directly to recreate Knightfall (Bane outplaying Batman, breaking his back) and No Man's Land (bad circumstances causing Gotham City to be abandoned by the U.S. government) but those storylines stretch the audience's credulity outside of a comic book, in my opinion. It's one thing to encounter those storylines over the course of several months worth of setup across several issues, but those storylines are a stretch when you have to rapidly introduce everything about them in a 2 hour movie.

MGS tries to be something other than a dumb as hell video game, so we'll see how well they can adapt it to film. I'd put it in the category of "more tonally serious comic books" where maybe they can get the adaptation right but it'll be a struggle. I can't think of many other examples where screenwriters have had to adapt a not-completely-dumb video game, so it's largely uncharted waters. I don't think they can paint in super broad strokes and just say "he's a cool commando guy that has to stop a nuke;" some of the story specifics are critical to the MGS feel, but they'll have to excise a lot of the less critical story specifics. It's certainly a tougher nut to crack than Resident Evil or Prince of Persia or Sonic or Pokemon.

THIS! This all day. I also acknowledge that people can take different things from games but ultimately in the core MGS games that focus on Solid Snake when did people take away that the guy experiencing existential crises about being a clone, aging soldier, and general human was this cold/hardass/physical intimidating character? Yea in the 80s Kojima took inspiration from the action movies that he clearly loved but he and the team at Konami did not write Solid Snake like Snake Pliskin.

And lets be honest Dan is ignorance is bliss personified and I still can't decide if that is a gimmick or truly his natural self sometimes.

I don't care about the height and body type etc. But Snake needs to have the gruff, sardonic voice for it to seem like Snake and I'm not sure if Isaac can quite pull that off. I mean other than that, Snake is a fairly generic action hero tbh. Then again, I'm not sure who else could do it.

Not my first choice, but I really don't know who to pick. I'm sure he will be fine. But most importantly will REx have the dick laser?

@bisonhero: Solid point! Your watchmen > Watchmen adaption is actually a big part of what I was thinking when I wrote my original post. Watchmen, the comic, exists as a takedown of Silver Age comic book superheroes, and also a commentary on black-and-white morality and Cold War-era politics. The movie......... isn't. it is an adaption in that it adapts on screen what is in the book, but in translation to cinema and the language of film, it ends up putting emphasis on the exact wrong parts of that story and comes out saying almost the polar opposite of what the comic did. it worships Rorschach, it thinks Comedian is a cool dude, it makes being a superhero sexy and fulfilling.

These are my worries about the MGS movie. I worry that a movie adaption will take scenes from the games and not understand why they worked. A fight with The End in MGS3 doesn't work as a scene in a movie because it is the culmination of your understanding of the mechanics of the game. Watching Drew have a monumental breakthrough moment in understanding how to play MGS3 won't have the same effect in a movie. having a scene where bullets bend around Fortune in MGS2 in a movie won't land the same because there won't be the pressure to survive an impossible foe that the game places on the player. Guiding a Nikita missile through a corridor won't be a satisfying action sequence because watching a CGI missile fly through a corridor is like, a suck-ass movie.

I do truly hope that the filmmakers can research and intuit what it is about MGS that works, emotionally, but I don't think that the film industry yet has a grasp on what can be so impactful about video game storytelling. Especially when gamers themselves largely don't care about the mechanical narrative being communicated.

Oscar Isaac is playing Snake, so have the 4th wall breaking address him instead of the player. Instead of reading a memory card, Psycho Mantis reads his IMDB page. "I see you've been playing a lot of action roles lately." "You're not supposed to say that, your lines were changed in the last rewrite." "Faster, more intense." Have a short (height) joke referencing Kojima's obsession with ladders.

@the_nubster: From what I understand, the attached director is a huge fan of the series, but who knows what that translates into (considering one Dan Ryckert is also a huge fan of the series and didn't realize it was at all political until like 2018). Regardless though, my bigger concern with projects like this are producers and focus testing stuff that end with everyone involved pissed off and rudderless.

I'm in the camp of, 'This movie is never getting made, so what does it matter?'

@the_nubster: As I wrote earlier in the thread, only MGS1 is adaptable for many of the reasons you mention - primarily because every single game past MGS1 is drenched in meta commentary and/or heavily references the previous installments building up an unsurmountable wall of lore. That first game works as a simple action movie but it will be incredibly hard to actually portray all the quirks of Metal Gear as fans know them today. While a game can get away with hiding under a box while playing it off as a super self serious tactical maneuver, a movie will have a difficult time with similarly drastic tonal swings. At worst these will be awkward winks and nods to the game that come off cheesy and forced in a film that is otherwise trying to portray serious events. During the Psycho Mantis encounter will the camera oddly focus on a randomly placed controller vibrating on a desk as Mantis powers up his abilities? Will Snake look back at a vent and remark how he has an inclination to crawl into it a few more times.. Will Otacon piss his pants? I dunno.

That new Monster Hunter movie looks like it's definitely trying to walk that thin line between inherent Monster Hunter wackiness and a serious Mila action flick with "high stakes" on the line. I think they have a decent chance at achieving both.

My real worry with the casting is that they are going with Isaac because he is charismatic and funny in order to be able to pull off moments of levity, but the reason most humor works so well in MGS is because Snake is stone faced and emotionally passive. It's funny because he doesn't acknowledge the ridiculous things he does or the events that are transpiring around him. Oscar is a charming guy, but Snake was always a little less than human in the games, and that was what really differentiated him from real people around him.

Have him look straight at the camera and say: "Oh, I see you are sleeping during the movie, James"

They can change it in dubbing to the most common name in that language.

Instead of Mei Ling being starstruck by the legendary hero, she'll be shocked he's shorter than she imagined. And she'll say no Chinese proverbs for fear of being written as a stereotype.

I've seen a lot of people making assumptions that by Metal Gear Solid movie, it's going to be a movie based on the first Metal Gear Solid--which seems...crazy? Like has that been confirmed somewhere?

Obviously the kiddo in me would like this to be incredible but I'm thinking we'll get some kind of military action movie with a light sheen of Metal Gear sprayed over it. But also I still think this will not happen at all.

@hermes: That was extra fun since my name is James.

This is a great choice for Metal Gear Solid, which is a movie that will never be made.

Well, if it can do both at the same time, I would say that's a pretty good adaptation of MGS

he's got the booty

@csl316: Karl Urban now and forever. Especially after I saw the movie Red, the dream casting was locked for me forever.

This film is not happening, mark my words.

The talk on the Bombcast about what a Metal Gear movie is just reminded me that they already exist. A lot of the shit in Metal Gear is just lifted from Escape From New York. Kurt Russel played Snake 40 years ago. Metal Gear has always been a parody of 80s American action movies by way of Japan. Turning it into a movie is some real snake eating it's own tail type stuff.

@brian_: Snake is loosely modeled visually after Kurt Russel from Escape from New York - even to the point where he identifies himself as “Plisken” in one of the games as a fun easter egg. But MGS is in no way similar to Escape from New York plot wise.

I'd be more worried about the director than Oscar. He's a really a good actor and they'll get him on "medicine" like these other action hero actors so he'll be bigger.

@humanity: infiltration and rescue mission involving a character injected with what equates to a ticking timebomb.

And you're usually rescuing a President of some kind. And Revolver Ocelot was modelled on Lee van Cleef.

@shiftygism: I stand corrected sounds pretty 1:1

Wouldn't have thought this was good casting until I saw "Ex Machina."

That dude can turn on silent menace. That said: why does this movie need to be? Isn't the joke about MGS that it's all cutscenes and basically already a movie??? Can this possibly be BETTER? Shouldn't videogames get out of the shadow of movies????

@ll_exile_ll: This happens a lot with Japanese games. Western audiences don't understand how short fighting game characters are, for instance.

@sweep Plus it would fulfill whatever demon's bargain he struck to be involved in every geek property in the last 10 years...more than 10 actually, oh GOD, my life.