A Hideo Kojima Joint: What Could a Feature Film Look Like From the Visionary Game Designer?
IMAGE COURTESY KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS
To say that the works of director Hideo Kojima have been influential on the gaming industry would be an understatement. From his humble beginnings with Snatcher and the MSX Metal Gear games to his later commercial and critical acclaimwith the Metal Gear Solid series and now into his recently independent introspective ventures with Death Stranding, each and every phase of Kojima’s career has shaped the medium of storytelling and gameplay design in the video game industry to various degrees of influence and imitations. Most of these industry-defining effects stem from his signature cinematic, Hollywood style storytelling structure, which he has been equally praised and criticised.
In early November 2019, just one week after the release of Death Stranding, the famed director revealed that his studio — Kojima Productions — would eventually start making movies. It made sense. After all, a movie with a title card ‘A Hideo Kojima Movie’ was always treated as a case of ‘when’ and not ‘if’. Still, the question about the career-affecting endeavor has been discussed to death by various media outlets but one core question seems to be very understated: what would this hypothetical film would look like?
To point out the hypothetical answer to this hypothetical question is a big hypothetical headache in itself. While Kojima’s line of work has its fair share of clichés and tropes, they still manage to be different enough to the point of individuality — stemming from minute details like the colour palette of a cutscene or the pacing.
The transition from making a game to making a movie can be financially tough and so for his first foray, he could be taking a more intimately mid to low-budget approach for the project, given the film is a live-action one. A fully animated movie is obviously out of question, since Kojima’s focus has always been on realism rather than something cartoonish, but expecting a fully live-action feature would also be out of the question to a certain extent. It is possible that the director might go full live-action but there is a higher chance that he would go for a mixed motion-capture route. Motion-capture animated films have rarely been successful in the medium of filmmaking. However, a director with experience and financial reliability concerning motion-capture technology might decide to play to his strength while being completely fresh for a different and newly-found audience while still retaining the interest of the established ones.
The biggest evidence comes from Kojima’s usage of motion capture in his last two games — Metal Gear Solid V and Death Stranding — where the scenes and character models are realistically detailed enough to portray every tiny expression of the acting performance to capture the same sense of immersion of a live-action movie. The biggest evidence of this factor is the performance of Mads Mikkelson in Death Stranding. A motion-capture animated feature might be Kojima’s biggest strategy going forward.
Never in a single Kojima project has the protagonist been actionably different than the last one. A typical Kojima protagonist is always surrounded by a constant push and pull effect of his actions on the world. Whether it is Solid Snake from M.G.S., Sam from Death Stranding, Gillian Seed from Snatcher or any of the others to grace the gaming screen, each and every one have faced some sort of identity crisis in relation to how their actions affected their lives and their surroundings — how the state of the world lead them, manipulated them to carry out those actions. They may only feel free of this bondage once they can escape their psychotic turmoil and only then can they truly find themselves. Many of the common traits in his work can be traced back to Kojima’s views on violence and society in general. If his work has shown anything over the past 30 years, it is that he loves to repeatedly state those sentiments regardless of the genre or style he works on.
Considering all the aforementioned hypotheses, it’s easy to picture a general outlook from Kojima’s previous works and the logical steps that he might take in making his future venture. Still, nothing is concrete, as there is an insane chance that the community proclaimed “mad-lad” of the video game industry might make something that no one was able to guess — just so he can get a good laugh in the end.