Oscar Isaac wants to play Solid Snake in the Metal Gear Solid movie, and the director is into it

For a long time, video game movies have gotten a bad rap as cheap, artistically bankrupt cash-ins, which…okay, fair. At best, they’re campy nonsense, like the 1994 Street Fighter movie. At worst, they’re horrible stains like 2007 Postal, and there’s a lot of mediocre blah in between; I’m thinking of 2005’s Doom or those meh Resident Evil movies.

But the times are changing. For one thing, video game movies are finally making series money. 2016’s Warcraft may not have been a good movie, but it made a pretty penny in overseas markets. And then there’s stuff like Detective Pikachu, which I find strangely fascinating.

God help me, but I am probably going to see that. I hope it’s good. It’s at least going to be interesting.

It seems like a generation of kids who grew up playing video games are finally old enough to make movies about them, and unlike the people who came before, these creatives actually care about the properties. Case in point: Jordan Vogt-Roberts, the guy behind 2017’s well-received Kong: Skull Island, is making a movie version of Metal Gear Solid, one of the most narratively ambitious video game series of the last 20 years. Will that translate into a good movie? I have no idea, but I have hope for a video game movie for the first time in a while.

That goes double if Oscar Isaac, the talented actor best known for playing Poe Dameron in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, comes on board to play the lead role of Solid Snake. According to an interview with IGN, he has his eyes on that prize.  “Metal Gear Solid, that’s the one,” he said. “I’m throwing my hat in for that one.”

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Later in the interview, he ruminates on why there haven’t been any good video game movies, which tells me he’s actually thought about this subject, which is encouraging. “With the video game thing, I think the trick will be how do you replicate the feeling of what it feels like to play a video game,” he said. “I think where it goes wrong often is with the plots.”

To be fair, the plots of the Metal Gear Solid games can get pretty cuckoo bananas, but with the right star and director…

For his part, Vogt-Roberts seems into the idea, tweeting that the ball is now in Isaac’s court:

In his tweet, Vogt-Roberts references a movie poster showing Isaac as Snake made by @Bosslogic last year:

So how about it? Is Oscar Isaac the Solid Snake the world deserves?

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h/t Variety