MORTAL KOMBAT
MORTAL KOMBAT I How James Wan and Simon McQuoid are putting the backbone back into everyone’s favourite fighting franchise.
The ultra-gory videogame gets a movie reboot. Fight!
It’s gory. It’s brutal. There will definitely be fatalities.” Director Simon McQuoid knows what the fans want, and what they want is a Mortal Kombat movie that isn’t anything like the two that have already been made.
Back in 1992, no one had ever seen a videogame character pull someone’s spine out through their mouth before; it was enough to make Mortal Kombat a household name overnight. The original beat-em-up classic has since spawned 24 sequels, multiple TV series, several comic runs and two live-action movies – both of which most people are more than happy to completely forget about. With a third film stuck in
development for almost 25 years, the franchise is finally getting a proper reboot, with James Wan producing a new R-rated fantasy martial arts epic that isn’t afraid to get its hands bloody.
“We’ve spent a lot of time getting the tone right,” says McQuoid, making his feature debut after years spent directing videogame adverts for Sony and Microsoft. “It’s got a lot of grunt, and it’s a lot of fun, but it also has to have an underlying authenticity, a richness. One thing I talked about a lot was this idea of making everything feel very elemental. We’ve got fire, we’ve got lightning, and we’ve got, you know, flying metal hat blades...”
The mix of blood and magic has always been Mortal Kombat’s trademark – with a supernatural universe set on warring realms that compete for the respect of the gods by pitting their best fighters against each other. Dragons, demons and monsters all duke it out in the game (along with Freddy Krueger, the Terminator and RoboCop in some franchise crossovers), but the real stars
are the superhuman heroes who have been fighting for the control of Earthrealm for centuries.
Into this arena comes washed-up MMA fighter Cole Young (British actor Lewis Tan, from Into The Badlands and Wu Assassins), who starts understanding what the dragon-shaped birthmark on his chest means when the emperor of the Outworld realm sends Sub-Zero (The Raid’s Joe Taslim), a ninja assassin with a penchant for ripping out people’s spines, to hunt him down. Cue a history-hopping, realm-spanning, blood-splattered battle royale between game legends like Sonya Blade, Kano, Scorpion, Raiden, Jax, Kabal, and Kung Lao (of flying metal hat blade fame).
“I wasn’t really a huge Mortal Kombat fan,” laughs McQuoid, “But I really felt like I went to Mortal Kombat University once I signed on. There’s so much detail, and it was very, very important to me that we got everything right. I’ve surrounded myself with people who know the world really well, and I’ve sort of leant on those guys to make sure that we really kicked the tires.
“I wanted to respect the material and respect the fans, and that means respecting the characters, and what makes them who they are. It’s all about elevating the DNA that is already pre-existing within Mortal Kombat. For me, it was all about this balance of big worlds, this underlying sense of humour and – and this is pretty obvious – it’s also about the brutality of it all.”
Of course, you can’t tell a Mortal Kombat story without a whole lot of Kombat, and McQuoid hired veteran stunt coordinator Kyle Gardiner (who last staged the fight between Godzilla and Kong) to craft “the best fight scenes ever done in a movie ever”, working with a cast of real MMA fighters and ex-stunt performers. “There’s a lot of fighting in the film,” says McQuoid. “Some fights are big, some are small, but my main goal was to make the fights mean something. I wanted the fights to look and feel like they didn’t just sort of pop out of the story and then come back in. I didn’t want anything generic. I didn’t want anything that you could see in any action movie. The stunt team on this were just amazing, and they designed some pretty fucking incredible things.”
Some pretty disgusting things, too, by the sound of it. Taking on a franchise that’s famous for its violence, McQuoid wanted to avoid the PG-13 pitfalls of the original ’90s films and bring the blood back where it belongs.
“It’s unapologetically brutal,” he laughs. “We spent a lot of time talking about blood and what it looks like, but we just wanted to do it in a smart way. We have to make it mean something and we have to make you care. When we need to push it to 10 we definitely pushed it to 10, so there was no one shying away from that. And there’s one moment I saw today that had me leaping for joy. It’s like Christmas morning every day in the editing suite at the moment – I go in and the effects company have revved everything up… I just can’t wait for you all to see it.”
It might have taken 25 years to bring Mortal Kombat back to the screen but talk is already turning to possible sequels, even if “cinematic universe” isn’t a phrase McQuoid is comfortable using just yet. “To be honest, that’s going to be for the fans to decide,” he says. “When you look back at the games and where they’ve gone with their worlds and their stories and the characters, obviously, there’s a lot more to draw from. But let’s not get arrogant here. Let’s try and get step one right first…” PB
‘IT’S LIKE CHRISTMAS EVERY MORNING IN THE EDITING SUITE AT THE MOMENT’ SIMON MCQUOID
ETA | SPRING / MORTAL KOMBAT RELEASES LATER THIS YEAR.