'Metal Gear Solid' Movie Casts Oscar Isaac As Solid Snake
Back in 2019, Oscar Isaac declared that he would be happy to play Solid Snake in the Metal Gear Solid movie coming from Kong: Skull Island director Jordan Vogt-Roberts. And now it looks like that's exactly what's happening. Isaac is now attached to star in the video game adaptation as the character, a former Green Beret and highly skilled special operations soldier engaged in solo stealth and espionage missions in a deeply unusual science fiction world.
Deadline has the scoop on Oscar Isaac playing Solid Snake in the Metal Gear Solid movie. This is a case of wish fulfillment for Isaac because back in 2019, the actor said: "Metal Gear Solid, that's the one I'm – yeah. I'm throwing my hat in for that one." After that news broke, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts commented on the potential casting and even revealed a fan poster with Isaac in the role.
The Metal Gear video game series was created by Hideo Kojima and published by Konami, with the first game released in 1987. The games blend military realism, alternate history science fiction, and anime craziness. Snake, who sometimes sports an eye-patch like Kurt Russell in Escape from New York depending on the game, is a "former Green Beret and a highly skilled special operations soldier engaged in solo stealth and espionage missions, who is often tasked with destroying models of the bipedal nuclear weapon-armed mecha known as Metal Gear." And honestly, that's just the tip of the iceberg. His backstory is...weird.
Vogt-Roberts is directing the Metal Gear Solid movie for Sony, with a script by Derek Connolly. When asked by Collider back in 2018 about his approach to the material, Vogt-Roberts said:
"The thing about Metal Gear is it's intentionally sprawling and it's intentionally dense. It'd be super easy to do one sliver of it or do too much at once. And we've spent the last little bit really trying to figure out, to me, the most Kojima-san inspired way to tackle as much of that story through a device that I think allows you to tap in...how to put this without spoiling it?...regardless, we have a device that I think allows us to respect the breadth of the franchise, respect the sprawling nature of the franchise, respect the somewhat convoluted nature of the franchise at times. But to still show you the mirrors. What I mean by that is all those timelines fundamentally exist because they show the repetition of war throughout time. They show the repetition and the cycle of pain throughout time. So it's almost impossible to tell just one story now. You need the full throughline of what this game is about."
However this movie turns out, here's hoping it embraces the weirdness of the games. For example: in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, the main boss is the President of the United States, and his right-hand man is also a vampire. Please, give me a movie with stuff like that. That's all I ask.
Isaac is a busy guy right now. He's working on HBO's Scenes From A Marriage, is set to star in the Disney+ series Moon Knight, will be the lead in The Great Machine (based on Brian K. Vaughn's Ex Machina comic), and will be playing Francis Ford Coppola in a movie about the making of The Godfather. With all that in mind, it's unclear as to when he's going to shoot Metal Gear Solid.