A Hideo Kojima movie?
 

If Hideo Kojima were to make a movie, what might it be, and be like? He said he wouldn't make a Metal Gear movie because he feels that video games are the best format for Metal Gear. So what movie would he make? Would it be grim-but-intriguing, like his games, or something lighter? I read he that he wrote part of a Tokimeki Memorial game. Would his movie defy expectations even more than MGS2? Would he make it a film for theaters, or would it go straight to DVD? Or maybe a TV series, because that's the only format with enough screen time to unravel his long plots? And if so, would he still use the Codec in order to include a lot of conversation cheaply?

I'm looking forward to whatever movie he makes, if he makes one. At the very least, I assume it would look gorgeous. His team already got amazing graphics out of PS2 in MGS2 and ZoE2. Imagine what they could do with pre-rendered graphics.

Re: A Hideo Kojima movie?
 

Re: A Hideo Kojima movie?
 

Pretentious, long, boring, completely incomprehensible, and with lots of bathroom humor.

Re: A Hideo Kojima movie?
 

Nothing against Hideo Kojima, but the public response would not be favorable. In both MGS and MGS2 the cutscenes were dripping with melodrama and were (dare I say it) "over the top". The death scenes in particular. How many times did Otacon burst into tears in MGS2? He can get away with this sort of thing in a game because the cutscenes are intersperced between reletivly long chunks of gameplay (though maybe not so long in MGS2). I will say this for him, though. The cinimentography in the cutscenes is beautiful, though again a bit overdone.

First post, by the way. Be gentle. : )

Re: A Hideo Kojima movie?
 

And nobody made the obligatory joke -- that Kojima DID make a movie, it was called MGS2. :D

--Jason

Re: A Hideo Kojima movie?
 

I'd personally love to see a Kojima movie. I adore the man's creations.

Watching some of the extra footage available on the Document of Metal Gear Solid 2 gave me some more insight into Kojima's resources for on-screen direction. One of the motion-capture actors mentioned how difficult the work was, since emotions could only be expressed by body movement, rather than facial expressions. Non-verbal communication is tremendously important--and since the polygonal constructs tend to handle broad, sweeping motions best, subtlety must be harder to achieve while working with motion-capture.

All that is mentioned to suggest that Kojima's cheesy death scenes may be necessary, at this point, to make up for the lack of tools to create the subtle impressions of a real human being. Look at Fortune's face in MGS2 while she's crying over Vamp, or while she's staggering after being shot by Ocelot. There's not much in it that would tell you that she's feeling *that* much different from any other situation. Increased drama in voice acting and broad sweeping motions--here, I'm thinking specifically of Otacon's slide down the wall to his knees after Snake leaves him to enter Arsenal Gear--are necessary to convey strong emotions.

As for the convolutions of the plot . . . well, let's just say that I loved Donnie Darko. I'm perfectly happy with whatever Kojima would throw at me.

Re: A Hideo Kojima movie?
 

How timely!

I leant my copy of MGS for the PSone to my neighbor who was home for a week waiting to start a new job. I talked with him last night and he said he had already beaten it twice (once to see what happens if Meryl died) and now he was going through it a third time as a speed run. Pretty impressive considering he never played the game before this past Sunday.

But then he says, "I'd play it some more if it wasn't for those damn cutscenes." He then proceeded to say how much he loved the actual gameplay but how annoying all of the interruptions were. "I want to go and kill people, not sit in a jail cell and chit-chat with some chick." I thought that was pretty hysterical, if for no other reason than it sounds like something that would be said on this board, not from a guy who seldom, if ever, plays videogames.

I told him I was going to lend him one of my PS2's and a copy of MGS2 but after hearing that, he'd be be better off just going and buying a copy of VR Missions.

Hideo making a film? Count me out. Way out. But then again, since his games turn out like boring movies, maybe his movies will turn out to have some lengthy periods where the audience is forced to play a game?

Re: A Hideo Kojima movie?
 

I agree that one of the reasons Kojima goes overboard with the melodramatics and long speeches is because he doesn't yet have the technology to communicate truly complex emotions yet. That and he's from Japan, which is one of the most insane countries, only less so than the US of A.

I was thinking about hooking up a camera to a TV set and recording MGS2, and then editing it down to a reasonable length, but as I was playing through it again, thinking about how I could do it, an interesting thought occured to me: Despite all the complaints that many of the plot threads are extraneous and some lead nowhere and others lead to places most people would probably not want to go, taking anything significant out of it would be robbing the story of it's identity. That identity just happens to be a cheesy, drawn-out, slow-paced, long-winded, action-sci-fi-drama-comedy-soap-opera with so many hanging plot threads and ridiculous tangents that it starts to look like a story that I might have written.