With recent films like Assassin’s Creed and Hitman: Agent 47, video game movies haven’t had a great reception at the box office. Ranging from mediocre to downright pathetic, there has never been a great recreation to any interactive story. As of now with Kong: Skull Island’s Jordan Vogt-Roberts is determined on changing that with a movie version of Metal Gear Solid, and it looks like the project is taking an enormous step forward by getting Derek Connolly to write the script.
Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ Metal Gear Solid movie adaptation will reunite the director with Derek Connolly as the film’s screenwriter. The duo recently worked together on Kong: Skull Island and Connolly are also known for his work on Jurassic World. He clearly has experience dealing with stories that involve humans facing off against enormous monsters, so making a movie about a giant, walking tank with nuclear capabilities shouldn’t be too hard.
The Metal Gear franchise is not one of those video games which are easily made into a movie. In the role-playing action video game, the player gets to be super soldier Solid Snake, tasked with bringing down a rogue Special Forces unit called Foxhound. The story, however and weirdness that spreads through the games makes it a unique experience, and one that makes the transition to the big screen difficult.
Nevertheless, a movie adaptation of the most popular long-running franchise, Metal Gear Solid, has been in the works for some time with Kong: Skull Island director Jordan Vogt-Roberts. He’s keen on getting the project underway.
Fans of the Metal Gear Solid franchise are highly anticipating Derek Connolly undertaking this massive task ahead of him in writing script. The Metal Gear saga is a plethora of video game stories and is virtually impossible to fit everything from a single game into a single movie. Jordan Vogt-Roberts has stated that the movie is not directly adapted from a single video game, meaning Connolly will have to figure out a story that meets all of the essentials while remaining true to the source material.
For those who don’t know what Metal Gear Solid is all about, the game revolves around a super soldier named Solid Snake who sneaks into an Alaskan military base which is taken over by a rogue Special Forces unit called FOXHOUND. Snake finds out that FOXHOUND has acquired a tank, Metal Gear REX, and the plans to hold the world hostage. The game’s saga has spread out across numerous sequels and prequels, but the first game in 1998 is the starting point for many fans of the series. Now it’s just a matter of time to see how Derek Connolly creates the story to actually make it work.
Here are his thoughts on Metal Gear Solid and going all-in on the source material:
“With Metal Gear, absolutely, my thing is we need to not just make a Metal Gear movie, but we need to double-down so hard on the oddities that make Metal Gear idiosyncratic and what it is—Kojima’s voice, the fourth wall, the goofiness, the anime, the manga, the hyper-violence, the talking philosophies, the characters who just represent ideologies. These things are Metal Gear, and I think, when you look at Guardians of the Galaxy, it’s like, “What genre is that before that movie came out?”
James [Gunn] doubled-down on that world and said, “No. This is what’s going to make people love it,” as opposed to saying, “Uh, it’s kind of like this” or “It’s kind of like that.” “It’s sort of a little bit of that.” No. That was able to be what it needs to be, and so for me, in the success of Kong, in the success of Logan, in the success of Deadpool, I’m able to go to the studio and say, “Let’s double-down on this and make this the absolute best version of Metal Gear that it needs to be.”
Based on his interview, it’s likely he would want to get an R-rating for Metal Gear Solid, but they’re still trying to figure out the best story to tell.
On the one hand, I’m trying to make a game that Metal Gear fans who are so passionate say, “That’s my Metal Gear. I’m so proud that this is on screen. I’m so proud it’s on screen this way. This is exactly what I knew it could be a movie. When I first played Metal Gear or when I first played Metal Gear Solid” or whatever they got in the franchise when they were a kid playing that game, the movie they saw in their mind, I’m going to make that.
On the other hand, it’s a tricky thing where I just gave an hour-long talk with Kojima at E3, and I asked him point-blank in front of an audience because we had a long conversation about him and film and I said, “What would your advice be to me? What would you have to say?” And he said, “Do what I would do. Betray your audience,” which is just such a Kojima thing to do. I want to be very respectful to the canon. I want to be very respectful to the characters and the story, but it will not be a pure adaptation, necessarily, of one of the games.
“I’m going to be … I’m doing something really interesting with a time device that I’m excited about that I’m so happy, once again, I pitched this. Much like when Kong when I pitched that kind of Harryhausen movie with “Platoon.” I thought they were going to laugh me out of the room. This is the type of idea I pitched to Sony saying, “This is what I think would be fucking badass” and they were like, “Cool. Let’s do that.” We’re playing with all of the different elements of it, and we’re sort of combining different themes and different arcs and things like that, but I can’t really get into specifics on it.”
The “time device” aspect sounds interesting, and it will be good to see how Vogt-Roberts will bridge the gap between Metal Gear Solid 3 which focused on Big Boss and took place in 1964, and Metal Gear Solid, which had the player playing as Solid Snake and was set in 2005. The Metal Gear series covers a lot of time frames and goes a lot of different places, and hopefully, Vogt-Roberts is given the creative freedom to bring his vision to life.
