Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ ‘Metal Gear Solid’ Movie Will Embrace the Video Games’ Weirdness

Video game adaptations have not had a great track record in Hollywood. So how does Jordon Vogt-Roberts plan to overcome the bad reputation of video game movies with his adaptation of one of the most acclaimed video game franchises ever? By leaning into everything that makes Metal Gear Solid so weird.

Vogt-Roberts is currently developing his Metal Gear Solid movie, and though he received a blessing from series creator Hideo Kojima, there are no details as to whether a studio has picked up the film or a tentative release date. But now, shortly after Vogt-Roberts built buzz around the movie by teasing concept art, the Kong: Skull Island director is giving fans an update on what they can expect in his Metal Gear Solid movie. Namely, that it’s going to be weird as hell.

In an interview with ScreenRant at San Diego Comic-Con, Vogt-Roberts said that he plans to overcome the video game adaptation curse by leaning into what makes Metal Gear Solid a unique video game: its weird supernatural, horror, and intensely anime elements:

“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.”

While I haven’t played the games, /Film managing editor Jacob Hall has filled me in and tells me that the Metal Gear Solid games are “a strange beast.” While Kojima embeds the series in the military industrial complex and tackles issues of PTSD and the lives and tactics of soldiers, he also bakes his stories into American conspiracy theories while also being, quite plainly, anime as hell. We’re talking vampires, giant mechs, magical shaman bad guys, and shirtless fist fights on top of giant destroyed robots.

The latter part sounds like the elements that Vogt-Roberts will lean into with his adaptation. The weird, the supernatural, the shirtless fist fights atop giant mech robots. It sounds bonkers as hell, and not something that a Hollywood studio would easily sign off on — especially after they spent decades trying to smooth out the weirder parts of anime adaptations into something more digestible (to little success).

But Vogt-Roberts told ScreenRant, “I aim to try and recreate what a game made you feel when you played it.” Rather than turning a video game adaptation into a condensed cinematic version of itself, he wants his adaptation to feel as video game as possible. That’s part of him being a video game fan himself, he said:

“It just was a part of us, you know, like so much of my DNA was rewired at a young age by video games and by anime and Manga and, and so it naturally bleeds itself into the films that I make and I just think there’ve been a lot of adaptations of games that I think if missed what it made you feel and what it, what it tapped into when you’re like in your basement alone, just playing for six hours at a time, playing for playing for like a, you don’t want to put it down. And for me, I just want to find that honesty and that truth and, and Metal Gear has so many elements and so many like hard things that it’s just one of my favorite properties on the planet. So I’m very protective over it.”

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