Mortal Kombat — How to Get Finished by the Video Game Movie Curse | Anatomy Of A Failure

This is not the blood of the chosen one. 2021's Mortal Kombat is the latest

movie

in the hbo max event where a bunch of cultural eras battle each other, only this time it's not cats vs. mice or monkeys vs. lizards, but rather a divine creature from another planet. versus a guy at your neighborhood gym and there are definitely reasons to enjoy it. Some of the fight scenes are very well choreographed and executed. Some of the visuals and physical effects are very visually striking and I also like the mentality that many of these characters are not in their immediately known forms, but are developed throughout the story, as well as respect to the noticers for not realizing the macabre of the source material as if they really tried, but ultimately all those good things are said, the hard truth is that

mortal

kombat

is still a victim of the infamous

video

game

movie

curse

, meaning which, while you can absolutely love it as a fan of the source material, if you view it simply as a viewer who knows nothing about it, you can grow out of it pretty quickly. look, oh yes, it's a

video

game

movie, it neglects basic aspects of the movie, such as the logic of emotions, to strongly recreate the style of the games, it sacrifices the quality of the story and the characters to repeat in two dimensions the narrative core of the games, I mean, in general, this movie is a slave to its video game origins that must serve those origins no matter how much it hurts it as a movie and to be clear the point here with all this is not to take away from the love no one for

mortal

kombat

as a video game movie like you.

You can love it no matter how much or little you want. The point here is to identify the key factors about Mortal Kombat that create this line of segregation of being a video game movie to potentially figure out how that line can be broken because everything is in order for the video. For game movies to one day become something truly popular, like comic book movies, they have to be able to appeal to the general public, something that Mortal Kombat doesn't really succeed at today, let's look at Mortal Kombat and some of your harmful issues arising from the video.

curse

of the game movie how those problems manifest themselves how they can be avoided here are some key things to keep in mind when making a video game movie that you want to watch and enjoy as just a movie oh but very quickly first I want to settle the controversy My recent Godzilla vs.

Kong video was basically talking about the Martha test and the problem with using half measures when solving the objective of one of your Godzilla vs. Kong opponents. and although the lesson itself is very important to learn, many of you were saying that my example was wrong, that Godzilla's goal was actually completely completed and if you thought about it, I'm sure you're right, I probably missed something . I have made a serious error in my judgment and therefore as a kind of peace offering for being wrong. In reviewing a movie that many of you really liked, I once again bothered my friend to show this website that makes these high quality metal sheet posters.

They sent me a bunch of them to give away like this one, a really cool Avengers one, so if you live. near the capital of Krakozia send me a tweet and you can come pick one up and for everyone around the world they were also willing to sponsor a special discount for the two week filmmento audience where you get between 27 and 33 per percent off everything on their site just for two. Weeks, however, that's all I could get if you don't know that they have over a million designs, from movies to games and whatever, and their official partners are different game companies like Marvel DC and also Star Wars, which is actually running a Star Wars special. day promo on May 4th so check them out with the club link below and also check out some designs that I recommend but yeah I hope now we can all still be friends and move on first.

Mortal Kombat constantly recreates the main point of the video games, regardless of how illogical, forced or emotionally empty it might seem that the main point is these mk characters fighting, for example, at the beginning of the movie, our hero mma cole is having dinner with his family when our main villains from scratch show up to hunt him down, prompting these other heroes to show up to save them and explain to them what's going on it means you've been chosen to fight as long as you have that market they'll come for you so whether you like it or no, you're the one but then for some reason Jax turns into an alley instead of away and decides to stay behind to handle the subzero just so Cole can get his family to safety, which of course, then it leads to and the problem you will find is that no matter how cool the jackson subzero fight may be in the context of the movie, there is no logical reason for it to happen if the mark of the dragon makes call valuable and jax has the same brand, why would you put yourself in danger for no reason?

Why not just drive? far, it's not like it's been proven that zapzo is frozone, that he can keep up with the car, there is nothing that forces jax to stop and participate in this fight, as a friend, this is a supernatural warrior that can control an element of nature and you have a gun and although in a video game these two may be presented as equals, not so much in a movie, imagine that even Terminator Calories immediately told Sarah Connor to leave alone and then followed Arnold to a warehouse to Fight him one on one, like this.

Then finally, when Jackson loses the fight and apparently dies, it's like, well, yeah, that was kind of silly and useless as another example. Watch the desert scene some time after basically Cole has now teamed up with Jax's friend Sonia Blade as well as Kano who. He also has the mark of the dragon and is letting Sonja know that, which then turns into: you want him so much, all you have to do is kill me, take it, it's your blood that has to go and what you'll notice about this small fight rhythm is the lack of There is no emotional justification behind this.

It's not like Kano has been repeatedly degrading Sonia for not having a mark to the point where she actually yells at him now. It's not like she's impulsively angry in a way that makes the fight seem real. It's not like she has to. she actually refrains from killing him, no, they both just agree on less nonsense and then they fight, which serves no purpose and feels like nothing. This lack of justification makes the fight really short, but it's still long enough to do some damage for later, since now that I've seen Sonia beat Kano once, the challenge of her beating him in the end it seems much less challenging because even though he has laser eyes, she already gained speed and therefore should be able to do it again.

I've seen you kick. his butt before, but now he has a laser, watch out for that, no, I have an idea and it's almost always something similar, we fight a random lizard that randomly appears without any setup or preparation or real narrative consequences, we have a long section of fights casual training sessions that have as much power as white noise, I mean, there's this whole big final fight sequence in the second act where the movie introduces new villains only to kill them off in the next scene, like it's some tongue-in-cheek version of Deadpool 2. It's nice big hunter Natasha, here we don't fight Sub-Zero for some reason, we don't fight anyone we've built or establish an emotionally driven relationship, we just fight all these different bad, empty and attractive guys from their games , some fights. are better than others, but others are at the point where the characters care so little that they leave each other alive or just walk away.

The mother is calling to really see the difference. Watch the beginning of the movie. This Japanese warrior finds his family murdered. Subzero then becomes enraged in an effort to confront him one on one. This fight is logical, it has a purpose, it's emotionally powerful, it feels like it means something, it works like a movie regardless of the origin, and that's what you should always strive to do. Whatever the point of your game is, that point has to be born organically within the context of your movie and not from the mentality that, well, games are about fighting, so that's what we're going to do here now regardless. what a second mortal kombat it is in such. a rush to incorporate as many narrative elements from the games as possible, at the expense of its own story and characters, simply put, the narrative of the game is that there is another savage world that wants to kill the earth's chosen mortal fighters first. a galactic tournament so they can successfully invade earth, which we know because the movie immediately tells us all this, both horribly and in text, winning mortal kombat cannot be left to chance, there will be no tournament because there will be no opposition left. fight and it is this mentality of the game's lore in abundance that poisons this film.

Take, for example, Cole, our main mma fighter hero, who mostly just loses fights for a living until one day the tradition of mortal combat pushes him into this great adventure as if it literally pushed him. Jax saves him from below zero and then they tell him all this stuff about his dragon mark and that he needs to go see Sonia Blade, not a birthmark. He goes to see Sonia Blade and Kano and then they tell him all this stuff about Mortal Kombat. tournament and they need to go to this training place hey listen to me I think there's another tournament coming up that's why you're here he goes with them to the training place and well you know basically most of this school movie and us is just an endless rapid fire of new useful characters, more knowledge, new useful characters, more knowledge, etc., etc., you must unlock your arcana and the character's problem with this is that it makes you call a boring shell blank whose only purpose is to be Filled and pressured by all this game stuff, he does nothing, he has no personality, he is basically an idiot who accepts every piece of information received at face value because the movie is already in such a hurry to debut the next, very simple, but how are you going to die?

He's leaving his family because some random guy he just met told him to, so you heard what Jack said, he's going to train for a tournament he's never seen because these guys say it's really important, you have to fight no matter what. doubts, I mean generally he will hear and see the craziest things imaginable and then move on like it's just another day in the office 806 west washington boulevard are you sure we can take it down together and he won't do it at all? stop until you're dead, are you sure we can eliminate it together? And the same thing also affects the story about coal.

Look, because this movie doesn't force coal to fight and win all this information, but instead gives it away for free. To be able to do it as much as possible, it all seems trivial and meaningless, being chased by sub-zero temperatures is no big deal when there is always someone there to look after you and explain everything you need to know, in fact, when there is a whole. -meeting God by your side already at the 40 minute mark, most things aren't that important, even when Cole discovers this life-changing truth about his lineage and his connection to Sub-Zero, it's not like that happens in any way. of an emotionally powerful and exhausting moment, but rather, oh, by the way, you are a descendant of one of the greatest ninjas to ever walk the earth.

He was murdered along with his wife and his eldest son by the same killer who hunts you now below zero, okay? thank you bye and the same obsession with laura affects almost everything and everyone when cole shows up alone at sonia's house at first she is very worried about jax jax where are you but a few minutes later she has completely forgotten about him because now they have to do it? go find the mortal kombat temple, which is fine because somehow jax is magically there anyway, the motivation on the villains side is based entirely on this prophecy of earthly heroes coming together, the prophecy is over us, which means we might lose the 10th tournament, a prophecy we're supposed to take as gospel just because the movie says it exists, which mostly makes us wonder why the super-operative villains don't just wait for the tournament. .

I mean, the Mortal Kombat tournament itself is precisely our purpose in this movie. To train and prepare it is essential that we begin your training for the next tournament, although neither we nor our heroes have ever seen it or in this movie we will, which is probably why the training section, for example, feels so insignificantly boring. there will be no tournament because there will be no tournament, in general the story of the game should not drive your story or your characters, but should come to light atthrough them. Cole shouldn't be given all of these answers right away and for free, he should fight to figure them out to survive one small piece at a time as a big intriguing mystery because if you just hand over all this outside world and prophecy at the beginning in a way that in no way has meaning , then in the context of this film for audiences who are not yet familiar with its meaning in games, the less it means what it will ultimately be.

Mortal Kombat is also so focused on filling its scenes and events with references to the games that it ultimately ends up damaging the very purposes of those scenes and events. One way this problem manifests itself is as a loss of credibility. basic that you can see for example in Jax and Kano's transformations, so as I mentioned, after the armless Jax magically appeared at a training site, he then wakes up with these bionics. arms because that's how he is in the games without any justification for how that happens in the movie. It's not like we see Sonia giving Jaxter the latest military equipment or anything.

No, suddenly the arms are just there because I guess the centuries old monasteries are known for their high tech Cybernetics, we've gotten all the kingdoms to find a way to cure it, yes, other kingdoms and don't worry, on top of that, the arms inexplicably rise too because that's Jax's mortal.Special Force Kombat. I guess at this point we have no idea whether these arms were powered by electricity or God or what would have happened if he never lost his arms in the first place, but none of that matters, of course, because the only thing that matters is that he is.

Now as he is in the games or watch Kano's transformation to become a villain I guess that is also the case in the games which here happens because and you can have more money than you know what to do with hell you could convert this entire temple. in your own casino if you wanted to, so what would you have to do right? Kano has the other faces because of financial gain, which is quite strange because it has already been established that our main goal is to stop the villain side from enslaving the earth and they will raze everything.

What are you going to do with money in a post-apocalyptic world? What good is a casino when there is no one there to visit it? Because everyone is too busy being enslaved and it's also weird how everything Kano does in this movie is motivated by money, even though it's never been established what he needs money for, especially since he seems like a guy who just takes what he wants without paying. , but maybe that's also a thing about games: two million dollars, so again the movie ignores all basic credibility and only cares about portraying things as they are in their games, I'm not beyond that, I'm below zero okay but what's the mask for another way this problem manifests is like the collapse of the established president like for example we have this first training scene with Kano where the main point is to show that he needs training and since Kano has established himself as a very aggressive fighter as the president said, this excessive aggression should be that weakness of his that needs work, very nice, let's look at the dropdown again, yes.

The whole scene is Kano getting tripped over and over again by the same sweep kick, which I'm pretty sure is some kind of in-game move, which is cool and all, but now you're saying that the reason why Kano needs practice is because Too slow and casual a fighter who gets caught up in the same move like you're not being very consistent and another way this problem manifests itself is the loss of basic movie elements like what's at stake. , urgency and intensity, etc., etc. You can see this in a training section that lacks any kind of pressure because we don't have a clear deadline on when the tournament is supposed to start, but the best example is this fight montage from the third act, basically our heroes just lost their You fight the bad guys and now we come up with the idea of ​​taking them on one by one, which then takes us right, so this whole montage exists mainly just to show off our hero's signature fighting moves and whatever, and that's it, there is no buildup, no anticipation, no risks or intensity. or power or whatever a third act movie needs to have, it's just something cool and fun that we suddenly do, the only exception is sonya vs kano, which at least takes some of that to the point that if we were really worried to win, we could have done it.

Just have the thunder god teleport the villains one by one and kill them as a raiden group lord. Can you send someone anywhere? There's no cinematic reason for us all to fight alone at the same time, but who cares because I'm referring to this reference topic. it even goes so far as to completely take away the power of even the biggest scenes, like at the end, for example, Sub-Zero manages to attract the coal alone, which leads to this really intense fight for not only our lives but also for the lives of our family so hard so that even coal starts to become a real person come here yeah just when the end has been placed on cole's shoulders his ancestor dead from the beginning shows up to basically free him from that weight like so many times before and just like that, even this truly intense Stakesville battle is reduced to something less because not only is our op ancestor there to help, but it also turns out that in this world even basic things like death don't mean anything new.

Death is just another portal to clarify again the The problem is not so much what happens but how it happens, for example, if you want Sub-Zero to face a scorpion, that's great, but couldn't you do it, for example, by doing that Cole becomes the new scorpion in this movie so that the ending still remains on his shoulders, I'm not saying that's the answer nor am I saying that this ending isn't good or enjoyable, all I'm saying is that when you make references or any Whatever we talked about today in relation to your video game source material, you have to recognize that the majority of your potential audience won't care, you can shout, come here and doom and whatever, all you want is a victory impeccable, but recognize that the majority of your potential audience won't care and ultimately as long as you make these decisions.

Ask yourself: Am I making a movie that works like a movie, or am I making a video game movie that requires the video game to fully work? There is the curse of the video game movie in spoken words and only after you recognize it can you finish it yourself