Michael Sarnoski nears the endgame on the Death Stranding movie script

If you were wondering what was happening with that slightly bonkers Death Stranding film everyone keeps mentioning, things are actually moving along – just not as quickly as your average Amazon Prime production. Here’s where we’re at.

The Game With the Funky Ghosts and the Apocalypse

Let’s back up for a sec. Death Stranding started life in 2019 as a video game from Hideo Kojima – who, if you know anything about games, is about as subtle as a fluorescent sledgehammer but often rather brilliant. The basic setup: the boundaries between life and death basically collapse, so now you’ve got all sorts of spectral horrors lurking about and society in ruins (which is actually more cheerful than certain parts of England on a Monday morning).

In the game, you play as Sam Porter Bridges, lugging packages across a collapsed United States in an attempt to glue the nation back together. Think Postman Pat but with a far higher body count and Mads Mikkelsen trying to shoot you. The original cast is properly stacked: Norman Reedus, Léa Seydoux, Mads Mikkelsen, Guillermo del Toro, and Margaret Qualley, though at this stage, there’s no news on whether those actors are sticking around for the film.

Sarnoski Steps Up

Now, about the film. A24’s got the adaptation underway, and last year got Michael Sarnoski signed on as director. You might know him from the surprisingly soulful Nic Cage vehicle Pig, or, more recently, A Quiet Place: Day One. Sarnoski’s a proper storyteller, won’t just crank out a by-the-numbers genre flick, so expectations are weirdly high for this.

The Script Is Nearly There

Sarnoski’s been out doing the press rounds for his latest, The Death of Robin Hood, and somebody at IGN managed to get him talking about Death Stranding. Where are we in the grand process? His words:

'I’m writing the script right now and hopefully almost done with that and really excited to dive into it. I’ve been talking to Kojima and A24 a lot about it. They’ve read a draft. We’re working on some revisions together, and they all seem super excited and happy with it. Kojima has been really generous in letting me play in his world but letting me tell a story with my own characters and my own sort of corner of this world, but keeping it honest to the game and doing something that fans will really like. So it’s been a great process so far, and I’m really excited to share it.'

Translation: the script’s basically ready, everyone at A24 and Kojima Productions is actually pleased, and Sarnoski is getting to do something slightly fresh with it, not just copy-paste the game plot into film form.

No, This Won’t Be Just the Game on Film

• The film will be set in the same world as the original, but we’re not following Sam Porter Bridges or doing a literal remake of the game’s story.
• Sarnoski says he’s using his own characters, but don’t panic: some recognisable faces from the game could still pop up.
• The vibe is intended to honour the game’s weirdness and heady vibes, but this is genuinely its own thing, not just another fanboy retread.

A Slightly Different Shade of Dark

In a chat with Bloody Disgusting, Sarnoski went into a bit more detail. If you were nervous he’d turn Death Stranding into another grim-and-gritty slog (the guy’s last film is literally called The Death of Robin Hood), you can probably relax a bit. He reckons this won’t be as bleak. Here’s his thought process:

'It’s not going to be as dark as The Death of Robin Hood. That was a movie that really had to capture this kind of visceral violence so that we could go to this deeply soulful place, and feel that contrast, yet also feel how those things coexist in this world. That was really important to me. Death Stranding is a game that deals with heavy stuff like the veil between life and death, isolation, connection, loss, and the distance between people both in space and time generationally. And so it has all of these pretty weighty themes, but it’s also like an adventure game and an adventure movie. So, I think it will definitely have some darkness to it, because yeah, there are ghosts and things like that in that game. There’s heavy stuff to explore, but I think it’s going to be a different kind of darkness. I think I like making movies that don’t shy away from the darkness, don’t try and sugarcoat it, don’t try and make it easy, but find a way through it, and a way to integrate it into the light and hope as well.'

So: it’ll keep the existential dread, loneliness, and death-ghosts, but balance that out with, you know, a bit of adventure and actual hope. Which is probably a good thing, seeing how the game’s bleakness could get a bit much for a cinema audience if played entirely straight.