True Blood

Guts, grapples, and Goro—director Simon McQuoid hopes to bring a faithful vision of MORTAL KOMBAT to the silver screen.

The relationship between movies and games has always felt frayed. There’s a sense that Hollywood doesn’t quite understand this medium of ours—and there are so many failed game-to-movie adaptations in the rear view that it’s hard to take a new one seriously.

The new Mortal Kombat movie, due this year, is… well, it’s not necessarily set to change that situation much. It’s not shaping up to be a movie with grand, serious ambitions, or Oscars twinkling in its eyes. But it does look like a film that actually understands its source material—not just in terms of story and characters, but in spirit.

“I said it to everyone who came on board ‘We are not changing the DNA [of Mortal Kombat],’” explains director Simon McQuoid. “And the DNA is built out of a few different, really key ingredients. There’s a brutality. There’s a sense of humor that runs through it. There’s a sort of epic world-building, a nobility and respect for its serious canon. And there’s a thread of silly.”

We see all of that in the first official trailer, a whirlwind of violence, dark humor, and cheesiness that does immediately feel like something out of the more recent games’ cinematic story modes. With its rapid-fire character reveals and fan-pleasing moments—including Liu Kang performing his memorable (and ridiculous) fire dragon summoning move—it feels like a statement of intent as much as a taste of things to come. Particularly so in its deployment of blood and gore.

BLOOD SIMPLE

Violence is perhaps the most iconic part of that Mortal Kombat DNA. More so even than ninjas, Outworld, and ‘Get over here!’, it’s the fatalities that the series is known for, both among fans and in the wider world. And yet the ’90s MK movies were PG-13s, with nary a spine-rip in sight.

Not so here. In the trailer alone we see impalings, throats slit, a heart torn out, arms exploded, and a man impaled with a knife made out of his own frozen blood. Thanks to the film’s R-rating, the violence looks more faithful to the games than any fan could have dreamed. And despite the risks conventionally accepted to come with making an R-rated movie—“it’s sort of obvious, you’re limiting, not expanding, your audience”, as McQuoid puts it—that was an element the producers at New Line were committed to even before the director was brought on board.

“I think the guys at New Line realized very early on that, actually, there was great power in that, and it was worthwhile to do it that way,” says McQuoid. “Those guys were really interested in making something

A WHIRLWIND OF VIOLENCE, DARK HUMOR, AND CHEESINESS