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Mortal Kombat is an extremely uncomplicated movie, because rather than trying to include every personality and event in the series up to that point, it focused almost entirely on the original game and its relatively small cast of characters.
#FILM MORTAL KOMBAT SHAOLIN MONKS MOVIE#
It’s extremely difficult to condense every aspect into a two-hour movie without making some sacrifices, but the key is knowing what to cut out. As I mentioned, a standard video game plot is a byzantine puzzle that almost requires constant quizzing to keep track of what’s going on, with dozens of characters and events and locales to remember. Also it features a dude doing an entire Tik Tok warm-up routine only to then immediately get frozen to death and shattered into a million pieces by a cursed ice warrior.Ī major pitfall of video game movies is that they tend to be overly complicated. Mortal Kombat is faithful enough to its source material without being entirely beholden to it, which is a major reason why it’s managed to stay popular for so long – it exists entirely on its own, but is also extremely rewarding for fans. (Remember how quickly Detective Pikachu evaporated from people’s minds?) I don’t necessarily think that a video game movie can’t tell an original story within the established world of the game, but it certainly helps to have at least some fan-favorite characters and storylines represented. Both Resident Evil and Sonic the Hedgehog were big financial successes, but I would be genuinely surprised if anyone is still talking about them in ten years. More recently, the Resident Evil movies created an entirely separate storyline with almost nothing in common with the games, and the Sonic the Hedgehog movie spat out a paint-by-numbers fish-out-of-water kids movie with Sonic plopped in the middle like a spiky wet turd. and Street Fighter have virtually nothing to do with their source material, and instead decided to be extremely poor versions of a bizarre dystopian sci-fi film and a Thunder in Paradise sequel, respectively. Meanwhile, notorious failures like Super Mario Bros. But Mortal Kombat was the first adaptation that really attempted to retain as much of the story of the game as possible, and it managed to do so while still being a relatively straightforward kung fu action movie. There hasn’t yet been a film that directly adapts every element of a game, because movies and video games are different mediums, and also because video game plotlines tend to be meandering batshit lunacy. There’s a delicate balance when adapting a video game into a movie, in which you have to be recognizable enough to fans of the game while still appealing to a general audience. To be fair, not every game has as clear a roadmap to follow. All the filmmakers had to do was follow well-established tropes of martial arts movies and throw in some interdimensional goblins and karate sorcerers (which are not exactly out of place in kung fu flicks) to create a perfectly competent genre film. Additionally, it benefited from being based on a game that itself was based heavily on Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon. Mortal Kombat the video game is a brutal kung fu tournament filled with crazy monsters and magical characters from another dimension, and that’s exactly what Mortal Kombat the movie is. That formula is – just be the thing that the game is. Primarily, it nailed a very simple formula that has, to date, totally escaped almost every other video game adaptation. How can this be? Well you see, Mortal Kombat both slaps and rips, and it succeeded for a few reasons. And not a single one of them has managed to reach the brass ring of greatness of the Mortal Kombat movie (not even Sonic the Hedgehog, despite his predilection for rings). But in the quarter century since its release, we’ve seen dozens of high-profile video game movies pass through the box office, including several Laras Croft, six Residents Evil, and the continuing crimes of Uwe Boll. This is largely because 1) it was only the 4th video game movie ever made, and 2) the previous two efforts had been leaky barrels of angry Donkey Kong shit. At the time, it was easily the greatest video game movie ever made. It’s been 25 years since Mortal Kombat exploded into theaters like an EDM fireball launched from the fists of a Shaolin monk, blowing my 12-year-old mind straight through the back of my skull.