GamesOpen WorldDeath Stranding 2What a 64-year-old movie can tell us about Death Stranding 2: On the BeachWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesOpen WorldDeath Stranding 2What a 64-year-old movie can tell us about Death Stranding 2: On the BeachWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Kojima Productions)
Yes, the name of the game really is going to beDeath Stranding 2: On the Beach. Obviously, that subtitle is an allusion to the literal Beach that appears throughout the first game as a sort of limbo between the worlds of the living and the dead, but that’s not the only reference here. Given directorHideo Kojima’s love of film - and equal love of sticking not-so-subtle movie nods into his games - it’s impossible to ignore the connection to the 1959 Hollywood classic On the Beach.
Kojima tweets about alotof movies, so those On the Beach references didn’t seem like anything too notable for fans of the director’s games. That is, of course, until the world learned that Death Stranding 2 would carry that name as its subtitle. So what is this film all about, and how might it connect to the story of Death Stranding 2?
On the Beach
(Image credit: Kojima Productions)
Content warning: On the Beach includes several scenes involving suicide, and this article will reference those scenes.
On the Beach is a 1959 adaptation of a 1957 novel, and the historical context of that time is important to understand the film. This was the height of the Cold War, where the US and USSR were building stockpiles of nuclear weapons that could destroy the world as we knew it multiple times over, with the hope that both sides would be too frightened of the repercussions to ever actually use those weapons. These days, that idea forms the kitschy backstory of often satirical post-apocalyptic settings like Fallout, but in the late ’50s the fear that the world could end at the press of a button was very real and present.
Director Stanley Kramer is known largely for work that dealt seriously with social issues of the time. Arguably his most famous movie, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, positively depicted interracial marriage at a time when it was only just being made legal in many US states. But the film On the Beach very deliberately avoids discussing the politics of the situation, only briefly stopping to speculate that you could attribute the apocalypse to some frightened person making a snap decision while staring at a radar screen, instead focusing on how the survivors of nuclear war spend their final months on Earth.
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A submarine mission to measure the radiation levels far to the north and investigate that mystery signal forms the central thrust of the film, and it’s here that we’ve got the most obvious connection to what we’ve seen of Death Stranding 2 so far. Much of the movie focuses on a submarine crew’s efforts to find out if unknown pockets of humanity might be out there after the apocalypse, or if there’s hope for anyone to survive. Based on thePlayStation State of Playtrailer for Death Stranding 2, it seems that Sam, Fragile, and the rest of the crew aboard the DHV Magellan are basically pursuing that same goal - seeing if there’s anyone else to connect with outside the ruins of America. The plot description on theofficial websiteeven mentions that they’re “on a new journey to save humanity from extinction.”
Should we have connected?
(Image credit: Kojima Productions)
True to life, the movie sets up radiation sickness as a slow, painful death, and once it becomes clear there’s no hope for survival, the government issues what are euphemistically referred to as ‘sleeping pills’ to those who wish to die peacefully. The film’s final moments follow a handful of central characters in how they choose to end their lives. Some take the pills, others set out for their homelands in hopes of dying in a familiar place, and still others find more symbolic deaths.
Could the central mission of Death Stranding 2 end up going that grim? For all its somber moments and dark pieces of surrealism, the original game ended up being almost achingly optimistic about the power of human connection. It seems clear from what we’ve seen so far that the sequel is taking a much darker tone, explicitly posing questions with taglines like “should we have connected?” There’s also a telling moment in the new trailer where Higgs chastises Sam for trading in his typical tools of connection for a gun, indicating that even our protagonists might be struggling with that whole idea of connecting the world.
(Image credit: Kojima Productions)
There’s a distinct difference in how On the Beach lands when you watch the film rather than just read a plot summary, but unfortunately, plot summary is how the vast majority of curious Death Stranding fans are going to experience it. The film isn’t available on any current streaming or digital rental service that I’ve been able to find, and even DVD and Blu-ray copies seem to be long since out of print. That’s a shame, because even beyond the connection to a modern blockbuster video game, it’s still a movie that hits hard 64 years after release.
Hideo Kojima seems to be working on 3 games right now: Death Stranding 2, OD, and the “action espionage game” with PlayStation.
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