The 90s MK movie actually follows a journey of characters from start to finish, with the stakes gradually increasing until it ends with Shao Kahn.
2021 MK ends with a Johnny Cage poster, lol.
The 2021 version opens up with scenes of extreme violence and then the rest of the movie feels like forgettable exposition with fighting in between, just because it's a fighting gam- wait it's a movie but it's a movie that's paced like a fighting game story mode, and it doesn't even have the MK tournament AYY LMAO!
(MK X didn't either. I never even played MK XI so who knows with that one.)
It's just not a good movie, only gamers would love MK 2021, because it feels like a youtube collection of movie cutscenes.
It's the same exact story telling style. Zero plot, all exposition, some fights.
Every one makes fun of how terrible DC movies are, but I had way more fun with Superman vs Batman, and I fucking hated that depressing ass movie. It actually had a plot though. I bring up DC Movies, coz DC Movies have the same dark, & gritty vibe that Mortal Kombat has.
MK movie is in a weird place, coz I can see why vidya gaem fans love it and pretend that it's a good movie, but I can also see why normal movie aficionados either hate it, or are indifferent to the new MK movie.
The problem is that 2021 MK has the same exact story direction as the MK 9-11 cutscenes, but made as a movie with real actors. So you get this really boring story where everyone is speaking exposition and then they find the lamest reasons to start a fight, and then the fights end in extremely gory MK 11 style fatalities that will turn off nearly 100% of the audience who weren't already MK fans. The excessive violence just seems to come out of nowhere coz there's no build up to the violence. One second you're laughing at how they're fighting for no reason (just like the vidya games.) the next second you're like ok, when you see the excessive Rambo 4 style violence.
I was roaring & hollering fuck yeah when Rambo was turning everyone into meat pinatas, but that's coz we just went through an entire movie where the Burmese military were brutally massacring innocent civvies, so it feels like a righteous comeuppance. Only the bad guys have fatalities done on them in Mortal Kombat, but none of them ever get established as a threat (except Sub-Zero who rips Jax's arms off.) to make the fatalities feel as though they were deserved.
They really done Nitara dirty (she's my fave MK woman.)
The fact that the movie fatalities actually have fans really shows to you how mentally under-developed, gamers are lol. It felt like friggin porn coz there's no build up to the gore.
, https://www.fightersgeneration.com/char ... itara.html
while she was nowhere near as hot as her in-game counterpart, she looked passable especially when compared to how ugly all of the women are in MK 11.
Movie-Nitara wears skin tight leather clothes, instead of a bikini thong & bandana.
It was hilarious how Shang was building Nitara up to be this huge threat, but Kung Lao just one hit ko's her and cuts her entire body in half. (Even Goro just gets ripped apart like he was nothing and he's like 10 feet tall in this movie.)
I was watching it with a few others at an in-home theater set-up, and one by one everyone kept leaving coz of the gore, AYY LMAO! Nitara's death was what really got people walking coz of how detailed her gore & skeleton was, probably coz she's attractive and you wouldn't expect someone attractive to die that gruesome a death.
My pops and I were the only two still watching the shitty movie. Which really shows to me why video games have such a hard time being properly made into a watchable movie.
The excessive violence just doesn't work in a movie setting, coz MK doesn't have a real plot. MK just has mythos.
The movie seemed like it was going to be good when it starts, coz the outworld scenes reminded me a lot of the un-used Darkseid scenes from the Justice League movie.
Mortal Kombat showed promise at first coz it starts out like a horror movie with a family being chased by Sub-Zero. Sub-Zero acted as a horror monster and he was killing anyone who got in his way, including hundreds of civilians. They make Sub-Zero seem ultra powerful. Jax had to stay behind to hold Sub-Zero back.
Then we see badass scenes of outworld with Shang Tsung and his crew looking badass.
Mileena is Black for some reason, but her acting is so good that it doesn't matter. She's not sexy like OG Mileena, but she does a good job of acting like a feral monster.
The outworld scenes don't lead up to anywhere though, since the entire movie takes place at a training facility where Liu Kang & Kung Lao act as teachers.
These two Shaolin motherfuckers looked cool and you could've built a movie around them. I don't see why they didn't.
I can't see why they couldn't have just used Johnny Cage, who for some reason is teased as sequel-bait, lol. Do people really love Johnny that much? When I was a kid, he was always a joke, and that's why it was hilarious that he was one of the only survivors (who survived plenty of fake-out deaths.) of Mortal Kombat 9.
Out of the characters they actually used, Kano would've been the best to use as a main character, coz he's the only one who would've had a full character arc, starting with his journey as a crimeboss to eventually becoming the hero that nobody wanted, but the hero that you deserve.
Kano was the only character I actually liked, he's also the only bad guy who didn't die.
Kano & Kabal were both really cool, too bad Kabal got eaten by Liu Kang's Dragon-shaped fireball. Kabal gave off a Deadpool vibe, and holy shit a movie with Kano & Kabal as the main characters would've been gold.
It wasn't the most horrible film by any means. It just felt like I was watching a collection of cutscenes from the video games.
There's zero character arcs. Kano could've had a character arc, since it seemed like they were turning him from a badguy into a reformed anti-hero but he just betrays everyone and then gets his ass kicked by Sonya.
Not a single character has a story, except for the guy no one cares about, Cole Young.
Spoilers: He's Scorpion's descendent. Scorpion is played by Hiroyuki Sanada (So that's why he wasn't in Godzila vs Kong, lol. Sanada is usually the 2nd go-to Jap guy after Ken Watanabe, although Crow's Zero guy was a good choice.)
Scorpion is hilarious coz he only speaks Japanese, but Sub Zero is Chinese, Scorpion just speaks to everyone in Jap anyway, lol. I guess it's like the Tekken games where everyone just magically understands what everyone is saying, regardless of how many different languages are spoken.
Sub-Zero & Scorpion are the only two who have a decent fight scene, with little to no cut-aways, but it's ruined by Cole who jumps in to team up against Sub-Zero.
The actors for the MK movie where all pretty attractive. (Unlike MK11, where every single woman looks like a dude.) I actually thought Sonya Blade's actress was hot (way hotter than the Sonya from the 90s movie), and she hasn't been hot in the games since MK Armageddon.
Cole Young seems to only be casted to have an attractive leading Asian man in the cast. He looked huge, like a real life Jin Kazama. My mom thought he was pretty hot, but apparently not hot enough to build a movie around. He has zero charisma.
I was actually shocked that the movie didn't treat Sonya Blade like a superwoman, Liu Kang & Kung Lao actually stuck to oriental traditions, and didn't even allow her to train with them. They came up with some stupid reason, she didn't have an "Arcana", which is a dragon mark that one needs to earn super powers.
Seriously, the plot is really stupid, like a little kid's tv show, which is why it's weird that it's so damn violent.
The plot is dumb enough that only a kid could actually enjoy the writing but the violence is way worse than most horror movies, which is why MK is in this weird limbo.
I don't even understand why it's labeled as a success when it barely made back its 55 million budget.
The extremely low-budget 90s version with the corny Power Ranger's combat was way better coz only Liu Kang played the role of boring ass hero, whereas you have 5 or 6 (Cole Young, Liu Kang, Kung Lao, Raiden, Sonya, Jax ) characters playing the boring stoic lead in MK2021.
As a movie, the 90s version felt more like an epic adv.
This thread is a redo of the Muh Representation thread. Since nobody fucking replied, I fucking deleted it. Just saying, coz Xed gets annoyed when I delete my own threads. I ain't gonna fucking write a blog post if nobody is replying.
In reply to some quotes I originally wrote.
Holy shit, the Highlander Raiden from the 90s MK was way more entertaining. Funny how modern Americans are so woke, that they'd erase Christopher Lambert's role as Raiden, when chances are, he was the only reason that most adults bothered to watch the original MK. Lambert is funny & entertaining as fuck.Asian-Americans be so fucking goofy that they complain about how Raiden from the original Mortal Kombat movie was casted as a charismatic White guy. I never noticed that Raiden was supposed to be Asian, LOL! I just thought he were a Thunder God, which had no basis on any ethnicity within the context of the MK setting.
Sure, Raiden has a Japanese name (which isn't even pronounced like a Japanese name, AYY LMAO!), but he's dressed like a Vietnamese farmer, and looks like he stepped right out of a Chinese kung-fu movie.
The Asian Raiden from the 2021 movie acts more like his in-game counterpart, but it's just boring.
What made the game Raiden work, is that he was this imposing 7 ft tall God of Lightning.
Movie Raiden is played by the Ichi the Killer actor. I honestly had no idea it was Tadanabo Asano, coz his English is so damn fluent. He sounds like an American, Asano sounds exactly like how Raiden speaks in the vidya games. S
Which sure, if you're looking for an exact game conversion, made into a movie. You'll prob get a kick out of it. I just though Raiden was boring & dour, especially since it's Tadanabo Asano, the guy who used to portray insanely animated killers.
Kuai Lang isn't in the movie, so I made an ignorant comment in the original thread about how they gook-washed Sub-Zero's race. Bi-Han, the original Sub-Zero was always Chinese though. It's his MK2 successor who was Half-White, Half-Chinese.
Kung Lao's actor is half white, chinese but you won't notice until you see his epic chin. A chin that Antonio Inoki would be proud of.
I think this comment I wrote is still relevant.
You Gook-Americans do realize that Mortal Kombat has always been an American pastiche of Asian kung fu movies right? There's nothing authentically Asian about MK, and I don't think it needs to be.
That's what always made Mortal Kombat so awesome to me, it was this American project that's so influenced by Asian culture that they made Asian cultures into their own very weird, very Americanized thing that resembles American comic books far more than it does the works of the country & regions that they were paying homage to.
Japanese people do that all the time with American culture, but most Americans usually love it when Japan does that, like with Resident Evil. Although personally I preferred the Resident Evil that imitated Hollywood and filled the games with supermodels. Modern Resident Evil fucking sucks coz it's filled with ugly ass Americans.
Goddamn it, the reason why I play videogames is to get away from ugly ass Americans, and now you're forcing ugly generic American people into japanese games? lol
At the same time, I can see why Asian Americans who probably weren't alive back in the 80s & 90s, would be so proud over this piece of shit movie. It is the first American movie that I've seen in a long time where nearly every single role is played by a macho-looking Oriental man. Some of these guys looked legit tough like Hiroyuki Sanada (no shock there.) or the dude who played Kung Lao.
Still though, the movie does come off like an American-pastiche. I'm not sure how well it'll do in Asia, and especially Japan, even with Hiroyuki Sanada & Tadanabo Asano playing fairly major roles in the movie.
Kung Lao is so 'asian', he uses his lefthand to eat with chopsticks.
I do the same thing too, or at least I used to. Till I realized that Koreans & Japs are laughing at me, regardless of how well I can eat with chopsticks. It's why I only use fork, spoon & knife now. Fuck your sticks.
In Gook culture, they assume that everyone wipes their shit with their left hand so they're automatically thinking that you're eating with the same hand that you just shitted on or something.
It's another one of the millions of examples where Gooks just do things a certain way, coz everyone else does.
It's also why I don't see MK 2021 doing well in Asia at all, it's the small inconsequential things (such as the way they use chop sticks.) that Gooks from Asia will just look at, as if it's weird or inauthentic due to different cultural norms.
That's why I say it's best to think of Mortal Kombat as an American tributary pastiche of Asian culture.