I feel like the Cuaron influence on MGSV's cinematography is farily obvious, and it's been demonstrated many times over in this very thread, but an influence that goes under-discussed despite the fact that I think it's key to understanding what Kojima was trying to do with the whole of MGSV is Gus Van Sant's Gerry.
Gerry is a film about two men named Gerry (played by Matt Damon and Casey Affleck) getting lost in the desert over the course of a couple of days. It looks like this.
Long, unbroken takes, little to no dialogue from its main characters, all set in a sparse desert landscape. Sounds pretty familiar, right? Gonna throw another scene in.
The thing about Gerry, however, is that Gus Van Sant drew inspiration from two sources. One is the films of hungarian director Bela Tarr. The other is Tomb Raider for the PS1. Once you realize that, it kinda clicks into place. Most of what you see in a videogame is long takes with little to no cuts from the action. It's experiential more than it is visual. We talk about movies a lot, but really, this is Kojima returning to video games, trying to make it all a single contiguous experience. What this enables him to do as far as the high-level story of Venom Snake and Big Boss the OP kinda already went into, but what it also does is, as much as possible, erasing the boundary between player and character. And that has been Kojima's pursuit for most of his directing career, from making you raise the volume of your TV in Snatcher to looking for a codec frequency on the back of a CD case, to everything else he's done. That's the whole reason why he's so fascinating to consider as an auteur, with all the caveats that such a framing entails but that's really another topic all on its own.
