Hideo Kojima wrote an essay on the similarities between Dunkirk and Death Stranding

Hideo Kojima is the legendary game designer who created the long-running and absolutely insane Metal Gear series. He’s also a cinephile who loves to talk about his favorite movies and the ones that influenced his iconic game series. It seems he’s found another film to add to that list of essentials, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk.

In an essay for Rolling Stone’s video game section, Glixel, Kojima fawned over the acclaimed WWII drama, calling it “a new kind of war movie.” Comparing it to his own work on Metal Gear, which emphasized stealth over the outright slaying of your enemies, Kojima applauds Dunkirk’s focus on escape and survival over direct armed conflict.

The film is a sober depiction of the Battle of Dunkirk, which was a large-scale evacuation of the British and French army during the Second World War. It’s an unconventional war movie in that sense too. You won’t find the excitement of defeating the German army (in fact, you won’t see the face of a single German soldier), instead, the focus is on escaping from the enemy.

The film’s suspense, he adds, is born entirely from “the action of escaping,” a technique that also fuels Metal Gear’s best moments and was inspired by a different WWII movie: The Great Escape. Kojima goes on to describe how the Metal Gear series was his “30-year struggle” to create an anti-war video game, and runs down the history and meaning of each game, starting with Metal Gear Solid 3, the first in the series, chronologically, and the first to be set within the Cold War era.