Discuss Mortal Kombat: Annihilation
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This film turned 20 years old
posted by David ProSTAFFMOD on November 26, 2017 at 11:01 AM
The sequel to the 1995 Mortal Kombat film turned 20 years old on November 21.
With the exception of Robin Shou (Liu Kang) and Talisa Soto (Kitana), most of the cast from the previous film refused to come back. Bridgette Wilson (Sonya Blade) decided to star in I Know What You Did Last Summer, Linden Ashby (Johnny Cage) hated the script because his character would be killed at the start of the film, Christopher Lambert (Raiden) decided to star in the 1999 film version of Beowulf and Chris Casamassa (Scorpion) ended up doing stunt work in Batman & Robin. Interestingly enough, Keith Cooke (Reptile in the first film) came back but in the role of Sub-Zero.
Mortal Kombat: Annihilation is still considered as one of the worst films based on video games. It's a shame that the poor critical reception and disappointing box-office performance ended up leaving the planned sequel to MK:A in development hell.
I suppose most users here don't like MK:A as much as the first MK film in terms of direction and script.
Reply by tmdb82469342
on November 26, 2017 at 11:46 AM
The anniversary celebrations are almost as loud as the pin I just dropped.
Reply by sati_84
on November 27, 2017 at 10:30 AM
I remember having high hopes for this after a good first movie. I think the first MK movie did not age very well, but in 1995, it was nice to see a movie that got almost all the story beats right and respected the source material enough to create something that was recognizable for fans of the game and could be enjoyed as a pretty decent supernatural kung-fu flick for people who have never heard of the games.
MK2 was vastly superior in technical presentation, atmosphere and story compared to the first game, so I naturally thought (my 13 year-old self that is) that the second movie will be even better than the first one. I did not really like the direction of the games post-MK2 (MK3 was decent, but nowhere near as atmospheric as 2), but 1997 was still a time for hope when it came to MK (films or games).
And this hope was crushed in a 2-hit combo by this abysmal failure of a movie and then the uninspired, lazy, primitive garbage that was MK4.
The movie tried to combine characters and elements from MK2 and 3 and its failure was epic. Few movies really deserve this phrase, but I'm not exaggerating. The sets, costumes, camerawork, CGI - all trash. If you hired a bunch of schoolkids to create costumes and scout locations based on the games, the visual presentation of the movie would have been lightyears better than what we got. The script was nonsensical, and in a lame attempt to try to capitalize on the success of the MK3, UMK3 and Mortal Kombat Trilogy games, they shoehorned every single character into this mess, clearly not respecting the source material at all. We have characters appearing for 4-5 minutes doing nothing significant to advance the plot whatsoever. Fight scene choreography should have been done by the aforementioned schoolkids as well and we would have been better off... It was just really pathetic on all levels.
As I mentioned, MK4 was lightyears behind the contemporary 3D fighting games with a fighting engine like Tekken 3 and more inspired design, it could have been a hit, but clearly Midway did not want to bother spending actual resources on the next game, they just wanted to churn it out as fast as they could, to get fans to open their wallets still in the height of the MK-craze... and in the process they just forgot how to make something truly special. And it went downhill from there until Mortal Kombat 9 which - ironically - did not contain too much new design elements, but finally was a focused and polished effort.
But I digress. Thanks for reminding me.