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Mortal Kombat (2021) Movie Discussion Thread

Zer0_h0ur

XBL tag: South of Zero
The R rating certainly saved this movie IMO, seeing Goro's guts fall out of his stomach, etc. Made it hype and made it feel like MK.
 

xWildx

What a day. What a lovely day.
It was decent until they ran into Liu Kang. Then it turned out to the levels of MK Annihilation for me. I thought the best Characters portrayed were Sub-Zero and Scorpion hands down. Really wish they went towards a movie story line based on them like the first 7 mins. I thought the 1995 film was better made.
Agreed. I feel like as soon as they reached Raiden’s temple the entire movie went downhill. The dinner scene was amusing, but I think people are overhyping Kung Lao.
 

DixieFlatline78

Everyone Has A Path
I really didnt care for the movie but the one thing that really irritated me was Cole's daughter begging him not to tap in the intro, like that's "giving up"
 

Darth-Nero

Come Thunder! Come Lightning!
Just watched the movie and my only comment is that Kano almost carried the whole thing, if it wasn't for all the subpar actors and whoever the fuck that Cole guy's supposed to be.
 

Kiss the Missile

Red Messiah
Man I just saw someone bring up a wild point. Cole being a hero is whatever, and him beating a guy bigger than him is a trope, but whatever. But Cole Young, the man who can't even beat other humans, kills the Grand Champion of 9 straight Mortal Kombat tournaments Goro. Thats fucking insane, I didn't even think of that until now. Goro beat the Great Kung Lao, a man who spent his entire life training to defeat Goro. But Cole "Crucifixed" Young whooped his ass in their first encounter lmao
 
Man I just saw someone bring up a wild point. Cole being a hero is whatever, and him beating a guy bigger than him is a trope, but whatever. But Cole Young, the man who can't even beat other humans, kills the Grand Champion of 9 straight Mortal Kombat tournaments Goro. Thats fucking insane, I didn't even think of that until now. Goro beat the Great Kung Lao, a man who spent his entire life training to defeat Goro. But Cole "Crucifixed" Young whooped his ass in their first encounter lmao
Hasashi bloodline is hax: the movie.
 

CrimsonShadow

Administrator and Community Engineer
Administrator
Even that doesn't make sense because even Hasashi got his ass beat in the beginning lmao
To be fair, Hanzo didn't have powers yet :coffee:

But still.. It did take aracana-enhanced Cole only about 45 seconds to completely dismantle the champ once he got the tonfa adaptation.

Edit: Nm.. I rewatched and it was actually 30 seconds.
 

Immortal

Blind justice....
Man I just saw someone bring up a wild point. Cole being a hero is whatever, and him beating a guy bigger than him is a trope, but whatever. But Cole Young, the man who can't even beat other humans, kills the Grand Champion of 9 straight Mortal Kombat tournaments Goro. Thats fucking insane, I didn't even think of that until now. Goro beat the Great Kung Lao, a man who spent his entire life training to defeat Goro. But Cole "Crucifixed" Young whooped his ass in their first encounter lmao
And after killing a 9 time MK tournament champion he couldn't brake Sub Zero ice in which his daughter and wife was dying. Gives you a perspective how consisent is the writing on top of its level...
 

Zviko

Noob
And after killing a 9 time MK tournament champion he couldn't brake Sub Zero ice in which his daughter and wife was dying. Gives you a perspective how consisent is the writing on top of its level...
Why is that specific thing such a bad writing? "9 time tournament champion" wasn't brought up enough to make Goro look like a great threat. He was made a jobber, everyone in the movie could beat him and that's fine because it was clear that Sub was the main villain of the movie and that just made him look even stronger which was the whole point.

Even the Great Kung Lao argument, what else do we know about him other than he defeated Goro? What powers did he even have? Also that was centuries ago. That just means he was the greatest fighter of his era but it doesn't mean fighters of this era are any worse than him. If anything they can only get better like everything else gets with time. It also highly depends on their powers.

BTW, I'm not defending Cole, I think it was stupid to add a new character and make him the main good guy, he wasn't even interesting. I'm just replying to nitpicks with my own.
 
No matter how badly someone trashes the movie, if they watched it, they supported it.

This is myopic. The success of movies also depend on word of mouth. People who watched it and found it boring won't recommend this movie.

That's why the second week of box sales matter a lot. It informs the studio what are the long term sales of a movie.

Streaming will work differently in terms of how they think it will be profitable but at the end of the day if they don't see 2nd week viewership hit their targets a sequel isn't happening. They'll reboot if the first week at least shows the upfront demand is there even if in the long run they fucked it up by making a movie with bad word of mouth.
 

Marlow

Premium Supporter
Premium Supporter
I assume Cole was added because they wanted an audience surrogate character, someone to try and walk the audience into and through the MK universe. Especially if they're thinking this is going to be the start of a franchise as opposed to just a stand alone movie. That seems to be the current model right now for studios.
 

xRantex

Rante Inferno
I assume Cole was added because they wanted an audience surrogate character, someone to try and walk the audience into and through the MK universe. Especially if they're thinking this is going to be the start of a franchise as opposed to just a stand alone movie. That seems to be the current model right now for studios.
I still think he was a Taven ripoff lol..
 

Kiss the Missile

Red Messiah
I assume Cole was added because they wanted an audience surrogate character, someone to try and walk the audience into and through the MK universe. Especially if they're thinking this is going to be the start of a franchise as opposed to just a stand alone movie. That seems to be the current model right now for studios.
Its an understandable strategy, but its completely pointless when you consider how many protagonists MK has had over the years. Liu, Johnny, Sonya, Jax, Scorpion. Any one of them could have replaced Cole. I've had so many people ask me who Cole is in the games and I have to tell them he's brand new.

You don't make an Avengers movie and have it star Piranha Commando
 

Onilordasmodeus

My GT: UncappedWheel82
Its an understandable strategy, but its completely pointless when you consider how many protagonists MK has had over the years. Liu, Johnny, Sonya, Jax, Scorpion. Any one of them could have replaced Cole. I've had so many people ask me who Cole is in the games and I have to tell them he's brand new.

You don't make an Avengers movie and have it star Piranha Commando
Thing is, it wasn't their goal to have a character to walk the viewer through, they wanted to create a ground floor story for THEIR MK movie. An origin that that they could build off of for future movies.

One of these days I'm going to write out my own review, but in the meantime, know that EVERY decision made by writers in this story was made to serve Cole in some capacity.

  • The movie started with Scorpion for no other reason than to set up Cole as his descendent.
  • Subzero didn't kill Scorpion in his trade mark way, rather choosing to kill Hanzo with his own Kunai so that Cole could be given Hanzo's weapon at the end of the movie.
  • Cole's trainer LITERALLY says that Cole has great offense, but no defense, and this is his theme through every fight in the whole movie...hence his arcana.
  • Pre arcana, Cole got his ass beat by everyone he fought (which was EXTREMELY dumb)...except for Kung Lao. The only reason Kung beat Cole was because of his Arcana. With no Arcana, that MMA fighter beat his ass, Sonya beat his ass, and Kano beat his ass...though Cole wasn't fighting back on that one. Oh, and Goro beat his ass too.
* Kung Lao and Liu Kang's role in this Cole origin story is the one that pisses me off the most. Liu Literally says that Kung Lao is Earth's only hope because of his blood line, which is why Kung and Cole's fight/training session was so important to the movie. It was the battle of the bloodlines. In the end, Kung Loa's life was "sacrificed" so that Cole could take his place as the hope of the tourney.

There is a ton more, like the reason Raiden was a useless dick the whole move was because, 1) he needed to inspire Cole's arcana to manifest, and 2) well there may not be a 2 as Raiden literally thanks Shang at the end of the movie awakening Cole's arcana and only after that happens is he ready to help his champions. The reason Raiden chose not to interfere even though Shang broke the rules, was to push Cole to get his power...and I guess be ready to win the Tournament in the next movie.

It was all dumb. They literally created Cole, wrapped the entire movie / cinematic universe around him (they even created a 4000 year old prophecy for him), and then plastered on some MK wall paper. I don't even think any of the character's back stories made it into the movie without some tweak or overhaul in order to serve Cole's story.

As a hardcore lore enthusiast, it was all disappointing.
 
I assume Cole was added because they wanted an audience surrogate character, someone to try and walk the audience into and through the MK universe. Especially if they're thinking this is going to be the start of a franchise as opposed to just a stand alone movie. That seems to be the current model right now for studios.
This is just treating the audience like idiots, which is an automatic fail for any movie imo.
 
Cool, mid-budget martial arts flick. Probably more fun for viewers who don't know anything about MK and won't be pissed off at Cole Young, Goro sucking balls, Kano's eye laser lore, Jax losing arms lore, etc. One thing I really liked about it, is that it never waited too long between fights. It was go, go, go into fight scenes which is nice.
What baffles me is how NRS is not taking advantage of this at all. No Cole (Kole?) Young DLC, no DLC skin packs (I want that Kabal skin), no announcement of KP3 with Goro, Nitara, Reiko in it. What a missed opportunity.
 
I really didnt care for the movie but the one thing that really irritated me was Cole's daughter begging him not to tap in the intro, like that's "giving up"
It's called Mortal Kombat, not, errr, Submission Kombat. And yeah, I know it's stupid. Daddy, don't tap, who cares if you get a compound fracture on your arm, still lose, and have to take 12 months to heal with no way to pay the bills.
 

Marlow

Premium Supporter
Premium Supporter
This is just treating the audience like idiots, which is an automatic fail for any movie imo.
I don't think it's meant to treat the audience like idiots. It's a fairly common type of character. Think Luke Skywalker from Star Wars New Hope, Neo from The Matrix, Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, Paul Walker's character from the Fast and The Furious, Harry Potter from Harry Potter. Having an audience surrogate swept from one world into another is a commonly used technique, particularly in fantasy and Science Fiction.
 
I don't think it's meant to treat the audience like idiots. It's a fairly common type of character. Think Luke Skywalker from Star Wars New Hope, Neo from The Matrix, Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, Paul Walker's character from the Fast and The Furious, Harry Potter from Harry Potter. Having an audience surrogate swept from one world into another is a commonly used technique, particularly in fantasy and Science Fiction.
All of which were originally written for their original stories, not shoe horned into established lore and fandom. The reasoning behind Cole is exactly because they think the audience needed it.