Hideo Kojima's long time love affair with Hollywood has finally paid off it seems, with actors and directors heaping praise on Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain's recent E3 trailer.
Konami's Japanese website has been updated with praise for the trailer from the likes of Pacific Rim and Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro, Drive and Only God Forgives director Nicolas Winding Refn, and Spider-Man and X-men producer Avi Arad.
“Watching the trailers for MGS5 makes you wonder if the spirits of Dostoyevsky, Stanley Kubrick, and Caravaggio entered Hideo Kojima’s body because, using the art of gaming as his canvas, he boldly goes where no one has gone before,” Refn said, who appears to think the game ventures into Russian literary realism, Italian high art, American cinema, and Star Trek which is obviously just as cultured as the rest of them, obviously.
Oldboy director Park Chan-wook says the Metal Gear Solid games are actually films, “He has actually been making films in his own way already. Metal Gear Solid games are already films, the films of the future.” That quote being pretty much the universal chant of the series' detractors.
While del Toro added, "Kojima-San remains a massive inspiration for me and Metal Gear continues to deliver the edgy, vital, jaw-dropping world and feel that we have come to expect but it pushes the envelope every single time. It is a window into the future of the medium and its breathless narrative and artistic expansion. Amazing!"
There are plenty of cinematic games, of course, and that's not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself but it would be nice if, instead of chasing Hollywood, developers started to make movies follow in the footsteps of games.
You can check out the trailer below and our E3 preview here.