Hey folks, so it’s Saturday morning, I woke up early and watched Mortal Kombat on HBO Max. I’ll start off by saying that I’ve been a fan of the Mortal Kombat video games since the first time I dropped a quarter in one of the original arcade cabinets way back in 1992. The game was cool. What was interesting about it back then was that you had these roughly photographically realistic fighters that you could make fight each other. Then what was really cool was that somebody on this new thing called the internet discovered that if you were playing as Sub-zero (the blue ninja with a cool freeze power) and you won, at the end of the fight if you hit the right combination of buttons, Sub Zero would rip the guy’s (or gal’s) head off. Awesome.
Mortal Kombat 2 was innovative in that they began to create a history and mythology-a story- behind each of the fighters and how they related to each other. Super cool! Of course, the main story line that I think captured most people was the bitter hatred between Scorpion and Sub-Zero. This is brilliant on so many levels. First and foremost, it’s lazy ingenuity at its finest….Hey guys we need seven fighters and we’ve only got six. Well, just make the blue ninja yellow and call it a day! Awesome! We’re done! Adding the elemental feud between the two really ratcheted up the drama!
They touched on this in the first film in 1997 (which I also loved by the way!) I’m embarrassed to admit it, but when I saw that MK dragon intro for the first time, and then watched the letters M-O-R-T-A-L-K-O-M-B-A-T whiz past my head like Shuriken with accompanying flying steel sound to form the title of my favorite game…I got a little choked up. Mortal Kombat to me has always represented time wasted with my buddies mailing in an entire Saturday afternoon hanging out playing MK2 on my Sega Genesis. The needling when one of us would get a 3-4 match winning streak going would sometimes come to actual, albeit short-lived bitterness, but the laughs were priceless! A number of my art school sculpture projects involved the MK dragon in one way or another. (I’ll post and link to one of those) Hell, I even painted a mural of the MKII box cover art in my room during my college days…super cool!
Anyway, this film-that I had very LOW expectations for really struck nearly all of those notes again. There will be no spoilers here, I will say only that my curiosity about the bitter relationship between ‘the laziness ninjas’-Sub Zero and Scorpion, was satisfied. For a video game film, I found the performances to feel very right for the material. The casting choices and the script, along with nearly all of the dialogue were spot on. One thing I would beg of makers of action films going forward…for God’s sake…never again include the line, ‘…a little help?’ From a visuals and effects standpoint, I thought that the visuals did their story-telling job exceptionally well. The art of some of the incredibly talented folks who display their work here on Artstation, undoubtedly under incredibly demanding timelines, brought this world that has meant so much to me in my 20s, to beautiful, believable life.
If you have ever been a fan of Mortal Kombat, I highly recommend this film. It is a LOT of fun! Take your buddies!