Are you rolling your eyes yet when you think of how many times Mortal Kombat has been rebooted? Well let’s just keep it realistic and say that it hasn’t been rebooted 100 times yet, but it’s definitely been taken around a bend and just dropped off without so much as a ‘thanks for the memories’ throughout the years. That might be why Mike Floorwalker’s article in Looper is enough to get people hopeful but still keep them from really investing too much in another Mortal Kombat movie since quite honestly the first two we were given weren’t that great, the second one especially, and the Legacy episodes that were started in 2010 weren’t bad but still weren’t quite the same caliber as people were hoping they’d be.
Wesley Lin-Poole of Eurogamer has joined the bandwagon of writers that are hopeful for this installment of the popular franchise but aren’t too certain that it’s going to be wise to invest that much in believing that it will pull off a successful movie. That kind of doubt is a little disconcerting to hear from anyone, especially a fan, but after seeing the first two movies it’s kind of easy to come by. Upon seeing the first movie that came out in 1995 it was a treat for a lot of fans until they saw that enough had been changed and that their favorite characters weren’t quite what they were expecting. It was a lot to expect that the movie would play out just like the game, but while the first movie was just ‘meh’ the second was a walking dumpster fire. It did introduce a lot more characters, but so little development was given to so many of them that it felt as though the director was simply trying to run through the roster without a care for back stories or even a hint of why these characters should matter.
Honestly it’s fair to state that in a movie like this there isn’t a lot of room for every character, let alone their back story and motivations for being the way they are. But perhaps this is why Mortal Kombat would be best kept as an HBO series or something similar. There would be a much easier time of researching the game and coming up with a way to satisfy the fans and tell a compelling story at the same time. As it stands now this reboot is already looking uphill and has a ways to go before it really starts to impress anyone. The cast is going to have to be on point, the story line will need to be compelling, and it will have to simply outdo anything that’s come before. At this point the story line for Mortal Kombat 11 is a better movie than anything that’s come along since the 90s when the franchise first got started.
According to Liam Doolan from Nintendo Life the movie is going to be taking things back to basics, creating an epic world around the core characters that really started the game and are essentially the most important characters there. Adding in extra characters is great but if you can recall this is when the whole thing started to slip into madness and eventually just kind of fell apart. There are various characters that were insanely cool to see when it came to Legacy, but Annihilation was just a mess. They tried to introduce characters such as Mileena, Sindell, Shao Kahn, Shinnok, Jade, Night Wolf, Cyrax, and a few others, but it was bungled horribly. The choreography was terrible, the acting was worse, and the story simply fell part as Liu Kang went to take on Shao Kahn and only won thanks to his animality, which was another bit of CGI ridiculousness that was ill-timed and felt like it was another bit of lunacy that didn’t need to be added.
So far it sounds as though this coming movie will be going back to basics and even possibly simplifying things in a few ways that fans might appreciate. In terms of the game some MK fans really do believe that things went wild after about the second installment and the hidden attacks and other effects got a little out of hand. After all, who in the world would want to see a Friendship or a Babality in a movie? It’d be laughable to be certain, but it would also be more than comical and would push the boundaries of what’s considered acceptable even for a fantasy movie. What’s being proposed at this time sounds a lot more like what a lot of us were expecting of the first movie, but in a much more careful manner than was taken in the first place. It’d be great to see the original characters come back and kick start the whole thing again, but we’re going to have to wait a while and see what happens.
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