According to a much-circulated red-carpet comment, Furiosa director George Miller would love his number one fan Hideo Kojima to make a Mad Max video game. “You know, I’m one of those people that I’d rather not do something unless you can do it at the highest level,” Miller, who has an acting role in Kojima’s forthcoming Death Stranding 2, told Gaming Bible. “I’ve just been speaking to Kojima here […] and he would take it on, but he’s got so much fantastic stuff in his own head that I wouldn’t ever ask him.” It’s a courteous professional compliment, from one auteur to another, that humbly assumes Kojima has better things to do.
My first thought was to agree. Whatever you think of Kojima and his games, he definitely has a distinctive vision, and his work carries a strong personal imprint. Making a movie adaptation seems like a waste of his talents, even for such a movie-obsessed creator. You wouldn’t expect George Miller to make a Metal Gear Solid movie, would you?
My second thought was: Damn, a George Miller Metal Gear Solid movie would be awesome.
My third thought was: Isn’t it a double standard, even a kind of snobbery, to consider Miller and Kojima above adapting each other’s work? Nobody would bat an eyelid at the prospect of a famous movie auteur (like, say, Paul Thomas Anderson) adapting a novel (like, say, Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, which Anderson is rumored to be making at the moment). An adaptation like that is seen as a conversation between two great artists, one bringing their own perspective to the other’s work. But we’ve been primed to think of movie-to-video-game crossovers (and the reverse) as mere brand extensions — because they mostly are. (Including the not-bad-not-great 2015 Mad Max game, which Miller told Gaming Bible “wasn’t as good as [he] wanted it to be,” earning an annoyed response from one of the developers.)
In his comments about Kojima, Miller dared to dream of something better. So let’s go along with that platonic ideal of adaptation and assume it’s possible, if only because it should be. Is Kojima really the right fit for Mad Max? I’m not sure. Miller’s world is famously one of few words. (Anya Taylor-Joy says she went months on Furiosa’s set without speaking.)
Kojima’s worlds… are not that. The Mad Max aesthetic is anarchic, rude, unapologetically metal. The Kojima aesthetic is techno-organic, militarized, sinister but tasteful. Kojima’s gameplay is painstaking and obsessed with detail; Miller’s action filmmaking is about big gestures on an empty canvas of desert. I think Kojima would smooth Mad Max out, flatten its pop iconography with too much world-building.
The other way around, though — imagine a Metal Gear movie with the dialogue stripped to the bone, the nuclear dread implied rather than spelled out in philosophizing monologues, the imagery punched up even further. Consider what it would look like if Miller’s talent for flamboyant introductions to outlandish characters was applied to the great Metal Gear antagonists, like Psycho Mantis. Think of the crazed intensity he would get his actors to bring to Kojima’s operatic spy narrative. Realize that Miller would insist the prop department build an actual working Metal Gear mech.
It could never work, of course. Apart from anything else, Miller would have to work with Konami rather than Kojima Productions on the project, and Konami, which has not shown a good grasp of Metal Gear’s appeal since an acrimonious split with Kojima, might not get it. I’m sure there are many reasons development of the actual Metal Gear Solid movie has stalled, but I bet Konami is one of them.
So no, I’m not seriously suggesting George Miller, who will be 80 years old next year, should spend his time making a Metal Gear Solid film. He, too, has got too much fantastic stuff in his own head. But just imagine. It would rule.