Mortal Kombat & Mortal Kombat: Annihilation

[kg redhead]

Mortal Kombat is a 1995 movie, directed by Paul W. S. Anderson. It is based on the popular Mortal Kombat series of fighting games by Midway. It was filmed on-location in Thailand. The movie has a sequel, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.

The movie is considered by many as the first good and successful movie based on a video game, despite receiving modest reviews from critics. It grossed an estimated $125 million worldwide.

The Earthrealm is being invaded by the evil emperor and generals led by Shang Tsung. Every generation, there is a tournament to save the Earth. If the Earth loses 10 tournaments in a row, then the Earth Realm will be doomed. So far the Earth has lost 9 tournaments. Liu Kang and the other Earth fighters must risk their lives to battle and win the 10th Mortal Kombat, or else Earth is lost.

* Robin Shou and Talisa Soto appeared in the sequel.
* Johnny Cage was played by Chris Conrad in the beginning of MK: Annihilation. However, IMDB seems to indicate that Linden Ashby will appear in the third Mortal Kombat movie as Johnny.
* Keith Cooke would appear in the second movie in the role of the younger Sub-Zero.
* In his very specific style, Trevor Goddard potrays Kano as an Australian. However, after his untimely death in 2003, it was revealed that Goddard is actually British. This came as a particular shock for people having worked with him as Goddard hid behind this accent his entire career. In the games, Kano was originally an American born in Japan. However, because of Goddard's excellent performance as Kano in the movie, he was later retconned as an Australian in his honor (in the Konquest mode for Kano in Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, while beating Reptile to a bloody pulp, the game's narration boxes say Crikey).
* The movie's techno-soundtrack has also gathered widespread admiration whereas the games have often suffered from very uninspiring soundtracks. It also lead to nominations in a number of institutions.
* Originally Cameron Diaz was going to play Sonya. However, Diaz suffered an injury before production, and she was replaced by Wilson.
* Brandon Lee was contracted to play Johnny Cage, but died in an accident while filming The Crow, and hence was replaced by Ashby.
* Two actors from this movie, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa and Talisa Soto, were also featured in the James Bond movie Licence to Kill, which also featured Grand L. Bush who played Balrog in the live movie adaption of Street Fighter series.
* On the DVD's French soundtrack, the part of Raiden is voiced by Lambert.

[kg redhead]

Mortal Kombat: Annihilation is a 1997 movie that was directed by John R. Leonetti. It is the sequel to Mortal Kombat. It was loosely based on the popular Mortal Kombat fighting game series.

The movie was not as well accepted as its predecessor and considered in most ways inferior. While continuing in the visual spirit of the first movie, it had nowhere near the level of authenticity in both its special effects and fight choreography. Additionally, Annihilation suffers from an overtly large and homogeneous cast, employed to depict as many Mortal Kombat characters as possible (most of whom appeared for a minute or two, then disappeared never to be seen again with hardly any good reason whatsoever), with a subsequent drop in characterization. Adding to that, due to budget cuts, there was a lot of re-used footage in some scenes. For instance, Baraka's fall into a fiery pit was the same shot used for Rain's death, since the purple color of the latter's uniform is somewhat visible in the darkness. Fans of the series also complained of a large number of inconsistencies with the storyline of the games, such as the fact that Raiden and Shao Kahn were brothers and the Fallen Elder God Shinnok was their father (in the games, none of them were related).

The cast was almost entirely revamped with only Robin Shou (Liu Kang) & Talisa Soto (Kitana) returning, both of them considered to be the film's only good assets. Also Keith Cooke, the actor who portrayed Reptile in the first movie was cast as the new Sub-Zero, who is the younger brother of the original, and Soto's stunt-double from the first movie, Dana Hee, is the actress portraying Mileena, Kitana's identical twin sister. Paul W. S. Anderson, the director of the first movie, refused to take part in this movie when the screenwriters did not make any true changes to the script. Almost all of the original cast refused to take part in it for similar reasons. All told, a combination of low funding, an unrealistically ambitious script, worn-out ideas, wooden acting from the new cast, notoriously laughable dialogue, B-movie special effects and repetitive fight sequences gave this $40-million movie a prominent position at IMDB's bottom 100 list.

Apart from being generally regarded as a classic example of bad filmmaking, this movie caused the Mortal Kombat franchise to lose strength during the late 90s. Despite the success of Mortal Kombat 4 (in both arcades and home consoles), interest began declining due to a steady crop of ill-fated projects such as Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero (a side-scrolling prequel in which the original Sub-Zero is the lead character) and two short-lived TV shows Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Realm and Mortal Kombat: Conquest that lasted only one season each (despite the fact that Conquest was popular). The franchise reached its nadir during the time of the mediocre Mortal Kombat Gold (an update of MK4) and the disastrous Mortal Kombat: Special Forces in 1999, when Midway finally decided to take some time off to get some really fresh ideas.

During that same year, John Tobias, the co-creator of the series and the main storyteller, resigned due to the recent downturn Mortal Kombat was going through, taking a large number of Midway's staff with him. By the start of the new millennium, Mortal Kombat seemed to be a relic of the 1990s until the release of the direct-to-console Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance (2002) re-ignited interest in the series.

A third movie has been planned to be released sometime in 2005 or 2006, with a fourth one to be announced sometime after. However, it's been confirmed that these two sequels will ignore Annihilation as non-canon and instead will be "true" sequels to the first movie.