Transcript
Speaker: You know what, I think I can tell you quite nicely to what we're talking about, which is it's a shame that in the final years of his career, he wasn't in 1995's Mortal Kombat as Raiden.
Speaker: And you know who else is Raiden?
Speaker: Hey there, everybody.
Speaker: Welcome back to Pixelate.
Speaker: My name is Kevin.
Speaker: With me today is James Hot Cider.
Speaker: He is here filling in for Phil, who is currently in South Dakota for a work trip.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Yeah, he is in South Dakota.
Speaker: Are there things in South Dakota?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: It's a state, I know.
Speaker: And it's big, land-wise, not population-wise.
Speaker: Fair enough.
Speaker: As you all know, land don't vote.
Speaker: Land does not vote.
Speaker: Despite what right-wing electoral maps would tell you, land does not vote.
Speaker: But today we're talking about 1995's Mortal Kombat.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Which is, I watched it this morning better than I remembered.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, if you want to go quickly into reviews, yeah, that is also my main takeaway from watching this film, which beforehand, I don't think I had ever seen all the way through.
Speaker: I think I had seen it in bits and spits on television.
Speaker: But actually sitting down and watching it all the way through, I thought to myself, you know what?
Speaker: This film is, if you looked up the word fine in the dictionary, you would see a copy of 1995, Paul Anderson's Mortal Kombat.
Speaker: Yeah, so yeah, the movie was directed by Paul, not yet W.S.
Speaker: Anderson.
Speaker: I believe, I'm not sure if this predates stuff like Hard Eight or whatever.
Speaker: I don't know who gets to claim it.
Speaker: being the first Paul Anderson to make films, but no, this isn't the There Will Be Blood and Boogie Nights Paul Anderson.
Speaker: This is the Resident Evil, Resident Evil Afterlife, Resident Evil Annihilation, Resident Evil Final Chapter Paul Anderson.
Speaker: And his first Hollywood film.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's his second movie overall.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: After a British crime drama called Shopping, which I was like, wait a minute.
Speaker: That's where the producer.
Speaker: So this guy, Lawrence Kasanoff, gets the rights for Midway to make a Mortal Kombat movie.
Speaker: He's like, this is going to go big.
Speaker: And he's like, who am I going to get to direct it?
Speaker: I guess he saw Shopping and is like, that guy.
Speaker: Shopping is a Jude Law movie.
Speaker: It's Jude Law and Sean Bean's first big, proper, big screen appearance.
Speaker: And it was a film that did, like it's a micro-budget indie, but it did do decently well.
Speaker: So they sent off, according to Paul W.S.
Speaker: Anderson,
Speaker: in interviews he said if it wasn't for shopping we wouldn't have Trainspotting or Shallow Grave.
Speaker: Oh well there you go.
Speaker: Yeah he reckons that Film 4, who were the company that funded shopping, only took a chance on those films because of the success of the film that he had made.
Speaker: So that, I guess that's his other claim to fame other than being the director of Mortal Kombat 1995.
Speaker: Well, you know, I would say his best work and only real work outside of video game adaptation, aside from shopping, is going to be Event Horizon.
Speaker: That's true, yeah.
Speaker: A film that I have only seen in business business, I only know it for the meme of...
Speaker: God, what's the name of the Australian guy who's in Jurassic Park?
Speaker: Sam Neill.
Speaker: Sam Neill, a man who genetically cannot scream, but yet is in a horror film, and they ask him to do it, and he makes the strangest sound you'll ever hear.
Speaker: Is he not able to scream?
Speaker: So there's a shot where he's having a nightmare, because obviously Event Horizon is the all-star hallucinating on a scary spaceship.
Speaker: And he sees his wife, his dead wife, whose eyes have been gouged out, and she's like, join me in hell.
Speaker: And they cut to him and he goes, ohhhh.
Speaker: And there was a good meme for a while of me and my friends used to shoot each other just the audio clip of Sam Neill trying to scream.
Speaker: Sam Neill trying to scream and not being able to do it.
Speaker: So, yeah, one of the interesting things about shopping, by the way, is that it was so British movie.
Speaker: So that comes out 94, I want to say.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Shopping doesn't get released in the States until 1996 after Mortal Kombat is already a hit.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: From what I understand, MK was in development for a while because I think the thing was as well is that
Speaker: Anderson hops at it as well because there's an interview with him where he says that he's from Newcastle, like a proper northern town in the UK, and he had to move to London to shoot this film and he just didn't get on with anyone, so what he used to do in his spare time.
Speaker: was playing Mega Drive, and one of the games that he liked the most was Night E2's original Mortal Kombat.
Speaker: So they come call and they say, hey, we want to do this game adaptation.
Speaker: And he's just, and he's like completely locked into the source material.
Speaker: He's like, I know what I want to do with this.
Speaker: And I think as well, not that we, not that we haven't totally got into the film yet, but a thing that I was kind of surprised by rewatching it was, I forgot it was Newgly.
Speaker: And I know that like production companies don't always factor in too much, but I feel like this is an interesting
Speaker: middle ground between where they started which was obviously the Freddy movies so like you know gore effects and stuff like that and then where they went which was Lord of the Rings because this has like a lot of kind of like grand fantasy island you know kind of miniatures and stuff elements in it but with this kind of almost gnarly gore aspect to it which comes from Mortal Kombat not that they do a lot of gore in this film because it was a PG-13 but right
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So, and that was one of the things I read is that they basically spent a lot of time working with the MPAA trying to figure out how far they could go as a PG-13 film.
Speaker: And they needed, it was like, you can't show human death on screen was apparently the quote they got back.
Speaker: So they're like, so we can show non-human deaths as much as we want.
Speaker: And they were like, yeah, that's fine.
Speaker: Sure, you've solved our magic riddle, so we will let you get away with this kind of... You've solved the magic riddle.
Speaker: Yeah, you've figured out our language, so we'll let you, yeah, get away with this kind of a conceit of gore, I guess.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's such a shame that New Line is not... I mean, it's... It's Warner Brothers now.
Speaker: Yeah, they got absorbed into Warner Brothers, and they're not their own thing anymore.
Speaker: I mean...
Speaker: Obviously, it's a lot of basically a lot of Hollywood's current issues are that, you know, the mid-level.
Speaker: Yeah, the mid-level distributor gets sucked into or studio gets sucked into the bigger studio.
Speaker: And, you know, we kind of lose a little bit of variety.
Speaker: in the industry and it's a shame because i know new line was always a little bit off kilter in terms of what they did you know and that was kind of where we got like a lot of like almost a lot it's funny it's almost a bit like how roger coleman gave a lot of people their starts like making right budget films for him new line gave like a lot of like sort of celebrated directors now like kind of again peter jackson got his start new life which is why they eventually did
Speaker: lord of the rings because he had like a really good experience working with the guy who was the head in the line who was a guy called Michael Luke who literally got his start like writing and like working on the freddy movies because he just loved horror so yeah and you feel and you do feel that in mortal kombat in a nice way it has it's got his bona fides is what i will say which is kind of what helped me enjoy it the other thing that helped me enjoy it is that it's a nice
Speaker: It is a short film.
Speaker: It is a tight watch, and we don't get that anymore.
Speaker: Old film studio makes movie like they used to.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: To borrow a Northern Lion quote, something he says a lot.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What's also interesting was the casting in this movie.
Speaker: So Cameron Diaz was supposed to be Sonya Blade, had to drop out due to a wrist injury, I believe.
Speaker: So just couldn't do it.
Speaker: And we ended up getting Bridget Wilson takes over as Sonya Blade.
Speaker: A few people that were considered for Raiden, including Sean Connery.
Speaker: And Sean Connery did not.
Speaker: Yeah, they went with his Highlander co-star, Christopher Lambert, who is...
Speaker: more composed as an actor in this than he is at any point in Highlander.
Speaker: He is completely locked in for playing a god of lightning from another world than he is yet, like, playing...
Speaker: Like, his accent in this is impeccable versus in Highlander where he goes, I'm Kevin MacLeod, I'm from Scotland.
Speaker: It's like, are you sure?
Speaker: Are you sure you're from Scotland?
Speaker: Scotland, Tennessee?
Speaker: Scotland, Paris?
Speaker: I'm not quite sure.
Speaker: That's the thing is, I don't know.
Speaker: Christopher Lambert's one of those guys where he speaks and you're like, no, I'm not picking up anything from anywhere.
Speaker: You're from anywhere.
Speaker: He's like Tommy Wiseau where it's like, he's got a Tommy Wiseau kind of vibe going where it's obviously not the same accent, but it's also the same in that it's just a mutant accent that,
Speaker: A little bit here, a little bit there, a weird voice, like gruff voice, and then Christopher Lambert.
Speaker: They got Robin Shue plays Liu Kang, and Shue hasn't done a ton of stuff over the years.
Speaker: No, it's mostly a lot of stunt guys, which I think is not a bad idea considering the film that they're making, which is essentially...
Speaker: Hey, if you're going to make a cheap film and you don't want to do a horror film, what's the best plot you can go for?
Speaker: Tournament movie, because it has exactly the same thing of a slasher, which is you have really strong personalities and characters that you can establish in about five seconds, mostly just through looking at them.
Speaker: And then you go, hey, do you want to see a bunch of scenes where we put them in interesting sets and see them fight each other?
Speaker: Yes, I would like to see that.
Speaker: Great.
Speaker: Here's your ticket for 1995's Mortal Kombat.
Speaker: He was, Robin Shue was also in the Dead or Alive movie.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: He was in the Street Fighter Chun-Li movie that came out in 2009.
Speaker: And he was in three of the four Death Race pre-sequel reboots.
Speaker: Oh, the Jason Statham one.
Speaker: Yes, the Jason Statham's in one of them.
Speaker: In the first one, and then the other two are Statham-less.
Speaker: So Death Race is a prequel to the Death Race 2000 movie from the 1970s, which is starring Sylvester Stallone, I want to say.
Speaker: I believe, well, I think that's a Corman, funnily enough, and I think it is like an early Stallone of just like, hey, you seem like you're going to have a big career.
Speaker: Play this bit part.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because, yeah, Stallone's in it, but I think the big... Oh, it's David Carradine.
Speaker: David Carradine, Sylvester Stallone.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: David Carradine.
Speaker: Rest in peace, you auto-erotic asphyxiation.
Speaker: You funny guy.
Speaker: Enjoyer.
Speaker: Rest in peace, you funny old guy.
Speaker: Ha, ha, ha.
Speaker: I feel like if Carradine was maybe... Because Raiden seems like the sort of character that a Carradine could have played of like an old... That could have been a Carradine, yeah.
Speaker: Because when he did Kung Fu, he was kind of getting by ambiguous Asian martial arts master kind of thing.
Speaker: It's like, hey, we have the perfect role for you in Raiden from Mortal Kombat.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right, and then in Mortal Kombat Annihilation, which we're not getting into, but Raiden is recast to be James Remar, who is mostly known at this point for being Dexter's dad on Dexter.
Speaker: Oh, James Remar's in Megalopolis.
Speaker: Look at that.
Speaker: Yeah, Link-a-Lockalypse coming out maybe by the time this episode is out.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: But please look forward to- Coming out in theaters near you.
Speaker: Yeah, look forward to Francis Ford Coppola kissing everyone on set, even though they're saying, please stop kissing people on set.
Speaker: Please stop casting people on set.
Speaker: Francis, it's just like, it's my last movie, I'm not gonna stop kissing people on set.
Speaker: I did this when I made the Godfather, why is this wrong now?
Speaker: Why can't I kiss everyone I see?
Speaker: Things have changed, Francis.
Speaker: Oh, Frankie.
Speaker: You've been in the wine business for too long.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I also imagine that he was there like he was the one stamping the grapes himself like it.
Speaker: Have you ever seen that like news flip of the news anchor doing it and then she falls over and absolutely eats it right out of the.
Speaker: Yeah, no, it's I imagine that that was his life for like a good 30 years before he's like, I'm selling I'm selling the winery where I'm making a movie and it's going to look like an Ayn Rand book adaptation on steroids.
Speaker: Well, it's gonna look like Spy Kids.
Speaker: Despite the fact that I have all... I have this money, but I really like the aesthetic of Spy Kids, so I'm gonna kind of lean on that.
Speaker: Oh, gosh.
Speaker: So the film was shot in Thailand.
Speaker: $20 million.
Speaker: It sure was.
Speaker: It's very much Thailand.
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: I will say, Thailand is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this film.
Speaker: At one point, I'm like, they get on a boat and they go to another part of Thailand.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: And there's just bits where they're fighting in this natural splendor.
Speaker: And I'm just kind of like...
Speaker: Man, yeah, Thailand is just kind of like, you could just set video game films in Thailand because it literally looks like the background to, you could have multiple backgrounds to fighting games in Thailand.
Speaker: Yeah, it's like, oh yeah, they could shoot a Far Cry movie here.
Speaker: I mean, one of the Far Cry games is literally set there because Far Cry 3 is funny, I mentioned this on an episode of Bullet Time, but obviously the second game is based on Heart of Darkness, but the third one's kind of based on, have you ever read or seen the film The Beach, Alex Garland?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So it's kind of a riff on that.
Speaker: The Beach is literally backpacking, goes to style and finds this magical island where all they do is smoke weed all day and loses his mind basically.
Speaker: Far Cry 3?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, by the way, Far Cry has been adapted into a movie.
Speaker: Totally forgot about that.
Speaker: Oh yeah, but- Starring Til Schweiger, it's an Uwe Boll, you know, money laundering projects.
Speaker: I was gonna say, it's an Uwe Boll.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Okay, but, because when you said, the Lille Carasse is the most German name I've ever heard, I was like- Yeah, Til Schweiger, who I think was in Glorious Bastards as the German, like the German in the group who was like the traitor to the Nazis.
Speaker: Oh yeah.
Speaker: And he joins up with the bastards.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Do you think Tarantino saw Far Cry and he was like, I need that guy in my next year.
Speaker: I need this man.
Speaker: In fact, he made a World War II movie so he could put German actors in it so he could have Schreiber from Far Cry.
Speaker: He could have Tilschweiger.
Speaker: I mean, the Far Cry movie came out before Inglourious Bastards, so... It could happen.
Speaker: He's got a terrible taste in films, Tarantino.
Speaker: So it's not in first season.
Speaker: Uh, so yeah, it is produced for 20 million, ends up making 122 million back at the box office and was released on August 18th, 1995.
Speaker: Huge success.
Speaker: Um, but yeah, let's go ahead and put the body in the marsh and, and let's get through, through this plot.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: When I tell you to dump a body in the marsh, you dump them in the marsh.
Speaker: The movie starts with a theme that we all know and love, you know, the Mortal Kombat opening title card.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Mortal Kombat Technosyndrome by the Immortals, who I found out for doing research because I was like, I've never heard of this group before.
Speaker: It's because they were literally put together to do.
Speaker: So the album predates the film.
Speaker: They had done it as promotional material for Mortal Kombat 2.
Speaker: But it was by two Belgian house DJs who created initially the groundbreaking group Lords of Acid, who I was like, I recognize that name.
Speaker: And these were guys who would pioneered a lot of techno music.
Speaker: A lot of their music was banned because their entire thing was, well, we want this to be like heavy metal, so it's going to be hard as fuck.
Speaker: But it's also just going to have a lot of porn sound effects over it.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: And everyone at Midway was like, these guys are sick.
Speaker: Rather than doing porn sound effects, here's all the sound effects from Mortal Kombat.
Speaker: Use the sound font from the game.
Speaker: Yeah, including the shouting Mortal Kombat, which is from the Mortal Monday advert, which is what they used to advertise either the first or second game.
Speaker: That's amazing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: All connects.
Speaker: Test your might.
Speaker: So we get the opening title card.
Speaker: We cut to two men fighting on top of what looks like someplace in Thailand.
Speaker: Mountain.
Speaker: And there's a guy in black coat and he kills a guy in a red gi.
Speaker: And the guy in the black coat, it's Shang Tsung.
Speaker: And he says, your soul is mine.
Speaker: And we get a, his face turns into a skull face and we get a little jump scare.
Speaker: And it's actually a nightmare.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Is Luke having a nightmare?
Speaker: Yeah, it's Liu Kang having a nightmare and wake up in his apartment and his apartment is green, which I love as a lighting choice that his apartment is just bright, lit bright green.
Speaker: Why?
Speaker: Don't know.
Speaker: There's no motivation for the light, and I'm for it.
Speaker: He lives in the sewer.
Speaker: He has green light all over the place.
Speaker: I mean, I guess in the game, he's like the red guy.
Speaker: Well, he has red shorts, doesn't he, and a red bandana.
Speaker: Yeah, he does.
Speaker: Or he's, I think, yeah, red shorts or black pants with a red bandana or something like that.
Speaker: So he just wants to contrast any environment he's in.
Speaker: Interesting thing I thought as well was that in his backstory, and I don't know if this is in the game...
Speaker: I did do a bit of nerding in this because I'm quite a fan of... I know tiny bits of Mortal Kombat lore, which is probably the most unbelievable thing about me, but it's because I like Mortal Kombat 9, which was like a remake of the first three, but like a big film like this was.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: In the plot of this film, he is a Hong Kong expat who moves over to the States, then comes back, and I was kind of like, huh?
Speaker: Are they doing a riff on the fact that Liu Kang is obviously based on Bruce Lee?
Speaker: Because that's kind of his backstory with that as well.
Speaker: It just reminds me of the fact that every fighting game has a Bruce Lee analog in it.
Speaker: And Liu Kang is the one in Mortal Kombat.
Speaker: And in another coincidence, I forgot to mention that before Robin Shue was cast, the tentative person to play Liu Kang was going to be Brandon Lee, the son of Bruce Lee.
Speaker: And then Brandon Lee died on the set of The Crow.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So, God, what an alternate timeline of seeing Brandon Lee's career play out.
Speaker: Brandon Lee and River Phoenix.
Speaker: Do you think River Phoenix would be doing the films that his brothers... Do you think he would be in Joker, Foyle, do?
Speaker: Yeah, I feel like we would have...
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I don't think – I think he would not be doing the same films as Joaquin ends up doing because Joaquin is like very unconventional looking.
Speaker: So he's always had to play the kind of offbeat guy.
Speaker: Like he's good looking but also just has that –
Speaker: Whereas River Phoenix was like the hot dude, you know?
Speaker: Handsome guy, yeah.
Speaker: He would have been doing kind of what Johnny Depp was doing up until, I mean, he probably would have been doing Johnny Depp's shows.
Speaker: He just did it literally in Johnny Depp's career in a similar way, which is, you know, and then he died at Johnny Depp's club.
Speaker: So... Hmm.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: See, what's the conspiracy there?
Speaker: Welcome to the conspiracy.
Speaker: Oh, no.
Speaker: So he wakes up and he gets over, shuffles over to his, his thing.
Speaker: He picks up a telegram from Western Union that.
Speaker: Your brother's dead.
Speaker: Your brother's dead.
Speaker: Come home, grandpa.
Speaker: Uh,
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: I doubt it would have been in English, but we're not here for that.
Speaker: We're not here for accuracy.
Speaker: Western Union translated it for him.
Speaker: Western Union translated it for him.
Speaker: We're all sending this letter of his in Chinese.
Speaker: We're Western Union.
Speaker: Yeah, we're the Western.
Speaker: We're not the United Union.
Speaker: We're the Western Union.
Speaker: Come the fuck on.
Speaker: Get out of here.
Speaker: We cut to Sonya Blade and Jax and taking their operatives.
Speaker: They're in Hong Kong and they're there to take on Kano.
Speaker: Kano, who is in this film, not in the lore, but they updated the Mortal Kombat lore because of it, played by an Australian.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And they like this change so much that they decided, actually, Kano, who used to be a Japanese-American, nah, he's Australian now because that's more fun.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: And this dude, like, is one of the best parts of the movie.
Speaker: He's out on a wheel of time.
Speaker: Playing Kano.
Speaker: I like it too, because it's like, you're not quite, because obviously it begins with the brother having a fight with Shine Song, and it's like, well, stylized, but it's a dream sequence.
Speaker: And then, like, he's very grounded.
Speaker: The Sonya Blade stuff is like, here is a special forces agent.
Speaker: So it's like, that's kind of enough.
Speaker: And then you see Kano with literally the metal pastry dish on his face, and it's like,
Speaker: Oh, good.
Speaker: No, never mind.
Speaker: This is a more... They know the tone.
Speaker: No, they know the tone.
Speaker: This guy has a fucking robot face.
Speaker: Are we going to explain it?
Speaker: No, we're not.
Speaker: It also does my favorite thing because he owns like a, he's like a underworld business guy and he obviously works out of a dance club.
Speaker: And despite the fact that they head in there with assault rifles and are like shooting glass or whatever, the movie behind them is still dancing.
Speaker: Like they don't give a fuck.
Speaker: No, they don't hear it over the, over the metal.
Speaker: It's like a John Wick thing.
Speaker: This, like this happens every week.
Speaker: So they, they're just used to it.
Speaker: We're in Hong Kong, baby.
Speaker: It's got... Yeah, this is normal.
Speaker: This is normal.
Speaker: It's Hong Kong.
Speaker: It's a few years before the handover.
Speaker: We got... We got nothing but time and fun to be had.
Speaker: This is great.
Speaker: Nothing but time and fun.
Speaker: So Kano is working for Shang Tsung, and his only job is to lure Sonya Blade to the tournament.
Speaker: And the way that he does that is by killing her previous partner.
Speaker: So she is out for revenge.
Speaker: So again... Out for revenge.
Speaker: So we have...
Speaker: Two of the simplest characters set up so far, which is your brother's been killed, come back home, and that'll be the set up for I want revenge against Shang Tsung, Sonya Blade.
Speaker: I want revenge against Kano and to find out why he killed my partner, which will lead it to Shang Tsung.
Speaker: Which then leads us to our third main character of the film, who has a slightly less straightforward reason for... Well, actually, no, it's kind of straightforward for why he enters the tournament.
Speaker: I do like the fact that it does do the fake-out thing of you see two action set pieces, which they look hokey, but that isn't the reality of this film.
Speaker: And then you see another hokey action set piece, but then they say, oh no, that actually was a fake hokey action set piece.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And what's funny is I noticed a clear difference between this set piece coming up where Johnny Cage is walking into a warehouse and he's fighting all these dudes.
Speaker: And you can tell, like, this looks a little fake.
Speaker: It's a bit stiff, yeah.
Speaker: They changed the angles just enough so that you can see that the punches aren't really landing.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And it's a, you know, it's a movie set.
Speaker: And Johnny is upset at the fight scene.
Speaker: He gets too sloppy and he wants to, he wants acting.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So he runs off set.
Speaker: Fun fact about that.
Speaker: So the director who's like Johnny, calm down kind of thing.
Speaker: That was originally going to be.
Speaker: So I don't know if you noticed, but the director is like dressed up to look like Spielberg.
Speaker: The original plan was that that was going to be a cameo by Steven Spielberg.
Speaker: That's amazing.
Speaker: Because as I bring up all the time of other time, Spielberg is a massive video game fan.
Speaker: And when I say that, I don't mean like, you know, oh, I like Pac-Man back in the 70s.
Speaker: No, like he is kept like up to date with stuff.
Speaker: And yeah, during the 90s, he was a massive Mortal Kombat fan.
Speaker: I think he liked the technology.
Speaker: I think he liked the ideas of it.
Speaker: But he was like...
Speaker: I really want to be in the Mortal Kombat movie.
Speaker: But time never worked out.
Speaker: So instead, the actor that they hired, they just dressed him up to look like Steven Spielberg.
Speaker: They dressed him like the way Steven Spielberg dresses on set.
Speaker: Like that exact look.
Speaker: Like the black baseball cat and the kind of the brown Han Solo jacket over a white shirt kind of thing.
Speaker: Fun fact about Steven Spielberg, he also worked with LucasArts to develop a game where...
Speaker: uh called the dig dig uh it was a point and click adventure game uh famously like had a terrible production cycle um but yeah the it's you know it it came out eventually and it was an interesting little game i remember uh playing it way back it was like right around this time it was like 1994 1995
Speaker: Smash Game Facts.
Speaker: My favorite thing I always like telling people is that if it wasn't for Steven Spielberg, we wouldn't have Call of Duty.
Speaker: That's true.
Speaker: He and his son, when he was making Saving Private Ryan during downtime, they would play GoldenEye on the N64 and he basically said, oh, his generation, this is how they're going to get war stories.
Speaker: So how do we kind of combine these two things together?
Speaker: He had founded DreamWorks, which had a game element soon, which is how we got like the bizarre Jurassic Park Trespasser game.
Speaker: But the one successful game they did make was the first Medal of Honor for EA.
Speaker: And for Medal of Honor, we get all those development houses where one of them
Speaker: had done Allied Assault, a game so good that Activision literally bought them and told them to make Call of Duty.
Speaker: And that's how we have that today.
Speaker: That's pretty much how we get... Yeah, Medal of Honor really does kick everything off, kick that boom of military shooters off.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: And I remember playing the first Medal of Honor and...
Speaker: Just thinking about how I had never heard a game so dedicated to sound design.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because you could hear they added in the bullets, like, whizzing by you and, like, impacting into the dirt around you.
Speaker: And I was like, oh, that's so cool.
Speaker: Like, you never hear that with...
Speaker: With games at that, you always heard the gunshot, but you never heard anything else.
Speaker: And that was like the first real step into, oh, yeah, there's two parts to this equation.
Speaker: Yeah, Medal of Honor.
Speaker: Good stuff.
Speaker: Steven Spielberg, it would have been fun if he had actually made this appearance.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: But he didn't.
Speaker: He didn't.
Speaker: And not only did he not turn up, but then the guy that Johnny Cage talks to has a bit of a Joel Silver look to him, but wasn't Joel Silver.
Speaker: Yeah, I know.
Speaker: I was like, this is a Joel Silver ass dude.
Speaker: Yeah, this is a big coat guy with a ponytail.
Speaker: It's like, no, no, Joel Silver.
Speaker: Dang it.
Speaker: Master Boyd.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: He gives Johnny Cage a magazine where they're all basically like variety, whatever he's saying.
Speaker: He doesn't do his own kung fu.
Speaker: He's a fake martial artist.
Speaker: He's a fraud and all that stuff.
Speaker: And he goes, how do I prove that I'm not doing that?
Speaker: And the Joe Silver guy says, why don't you enter this Mortal Kombat tournament to show that you're the best martial artist ever?
Speaker: And as Johnny Cage walks away thinking that's a good idea, the Joe Silver guy turned out to be Shang Tsung all along.
Speaker: In disguise.
Speaker: Done.
Speaker: Because he has the special power of doing a pretty cheap digital morph between axes.
Speaker: Yes, it's... And they don't go into it, but I have a feeling, is it like...
Speaker: Anybody whose soul he's taken, he can do a shapeshift into.
Speaker: So we can just assume that the real Master Boyd is dead somewhere.
Speaker: Yeah, Joe Silver died.
Speaker: Joe Silver died.
Speaker: And this is based on this stuff where this Johnny Cage issue where he's like, he wants to prove himself is actually based on Jean-Claude Van Damme.
Speaker: Who was obviously the original inspiration for.
Speaker: Yeah, in the early 90s, there was a big like, ah, Jean-Claude Van Damme is, he's just a, he's just a dancer.
Speaker: He doesn't do any of this.
Speaker: He doesn't know anything.
Speaker: So, yeah, that's a big inspiration for it.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: It's Shang Tsung and now we cut to Liu Kang.
Speaker: He is back home in Hong Kong, Thailand.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So he goes to meet with a Shaolin monk.
Speaker: So it turns out that his granddad is like the head of the Shaolin monks and he goes to Shaolin.
Speaker: Yeah, he goes to Shaolin.
Speaker: He goes to the temples to hang out with his family and they're like, look.
Speaker: Your brother died fighting Shang Tsung over... And I was actually... So here's the thing.
Speaker: So I watched the film once and I was like, that was entertaining.
Speaker: And then I went, you know what?
Speaker: I got to make notes.
Speaker: So I'm going to quickly skip through it and like kind of remind myself of it.
Speaker: I like the fact that they just deliver the plot in the simplest way possible in this film.
Speaker: He goes to Shaolin and they go, right, here's the facts.
Speaker: Yorub died fighting Shang Tsung.
Speaker: Why was he fighting Shang Tsung?
Speaker: Because there's a thing called the Mortal Kombat tournament.
Speaker: What's it about?
Speaker: Well, you see, there's two worlds.
Speaker: There's Earthrealm, where we live, and Outrealm, which is where all the demons and monsters live.
Speaker: Now, we have this tournament that basically is kind of like a... It stops... It kind of like stops wars from happening, essentially.
Speaker: It's like a... Yeah, it's kind of like if you... It's kind of like the same concept behind The Purge, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: One night a year, all crime is legal.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, so they send their representatives in.
Speaker: And that's the nice thing as well, is that because you go, oh, well, you know, there's going to be the scene where the three characters go, well, why are we here?
Speaker: This is all a bit random.
Speaker: But no, very quickly up front, they say, now, here's the thing.
Speaker: There's always three representatives from Earthrealm, and they could be from any background, but it's mostly the best martial artist, which...
Speaker: Turns out to be a movie guy, a police woman, and you basically, because your brother's dead.
Speaker: You're the dude.
Speaker: We're going to give you a twofer.
Speaker: One, you get to get revenge against Shang Tsung, which is what you want.
Speaker: And you get to protect it from, which is good because they've just won the last nine out of ten Mortal Kombat tournaments.
Speaker: And if they win ten in a row...
Speaker: Yeah, bad shit's going to happen.
Speaker: That punch card, they're going to get that free hoagie.
Speaker: Oh, God.
Speaker: I was thinking about it.
Speaker: It's like it's the world's worst version of like, oh, there's two out of three.
Speaker: It's like, you know, when you're doing poker and it's just like, no, I'll throw my watch in.
Speaker: No, let me throw my card.
Speaker: Double or nothing.
Speaker: Just deal me back in, kind of.
Speaker: So Earthreal and Kedah's going to be dealt back in.
Speaker: So it's now if they win the 10th tournament, they're like, oh, bad news.
Speaker: Shao Kahn.
Speaker: He's a guy that we mentioned a couple of times, but you don't really see him.
Speaker: But Shao Kahn's going to bring his army over and he's going to come in and he's going to wreck some shit.
Speaker: There's a weird cut in here where Liu Kang is talking about, he's like, tournament couldn't be real.
Speaker: Can't be that important.
Speaker: And he's like, they're talking about why he left for America.
Speaker: But then we cut to now he's talking and arguing in front of a group of monks that he needs to represent the temple.
Speaker: at the tournament and it's like we just i feel like maybe not deleted scene but it's like there's a reaction shot missing somewhere or something because they streamlined it just a little bit too much so you're missing a tiny bit you know paul was in that editing room hanging over the editor's shoulder like no sand the edges off more it's like we the audience has the exposition they need let's go next scene
Speaker: This is if Paul Thomas Anderson directed this, you would have like an hour with a shower.
Speaker: Like they'd just be having a pool party and taking drugs and talking about like how good the 70s was.
Speaker: And you'd be like, this is good.
Speaker: This is a hangout.
Speaker: Mortal Kombat is a great hangout movie if Paul Thomas Anderson had directed it.
Speaker: Yeah, oh, what's-his-name would have played Johnny Cage.
Speaker: Oh, PSH.
Speaker: That's what it seems.
Speaker: Felt Seymour Hoffman would have played Johnny Cage.
Speaker: These were $500 sunglasses, asshole.
Speaker: Just him saying, like doing the shut up scene.
Speaker: Oh yeah, doing that to Goro.
Speaker: Shut up!
Speaker: Shut the fuck up!
Speaker: Shut the fuck up!
Speaker: Shut the fuck up!
Speaker: There's a bit where like, Sonya Blade notices him and he's been like watching somebody and he's like, I'm such a fuck up, I fucked up, I'm sorry.
Speaker: Like the big guy in Boogie Nights.
Speaker: Oh, God.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We really missed a different timeline.
Speaker: Merging the Paul Anderson timeline.
Speaker: Yeah, the Paul Anderson should work together.
Speaker: That'd be good.
Speaker: Directed by Paul's Anderson.
Speaker: by paul's anderson and wes anderson yeah because it's for ws anderson and then there's wes anderson so yeah they should do the amazing you gotta get the pt the ws and the wes and the uh we gotta get all of them uh a shady figure who sounds like christopher lambert shows up oh shit it's christopher lambert uh lord raden uh uh says lu kang is running away from his destiny
Speaker: And Liu Kang thinks Raiden is just a beggar who wants to show him he can fight.
Speaker: And then...
Speaker: Yeah, they, you know, Raiden's like, ah, I got electric powers.
Speaker: I'm learning.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then this interaction where Liu Kang's like, why did you let Chen die, his brother?
Speaker: And Raiden's like, why did you?
Speaker: And it's like, Raiden, you're the fucking electric man who can be anywhere at any time.
Speaker: And he's just, he was in Hollywood.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, but that's why Raiden, that's why he's a god, because his response to everyone is just like, no, you.
Speaker: No, you.
Speaker: And he can hit that Uno Reverse at any time.
Speaker: Yeah, he can hit the Uno Reverse on any time.
Speaker: That's real godhood right there.
Speaker: Anyway, Liu Kang's going to go to the tournament and get his lunch.
Speaker: Yeah, they all go to Hong Kong.
Speaker: They all congregate in the same place, all three of them.
Speaker: Johnny Cage has all of his suitcases, Liu Kang.
Speaker: For some reason, Johnny Cage is like, hey, can you help me out with my suitcases?
Speaker: And Liu Kang just throws them in the water.
Speaker: Cool interaction, guys.
Speaker: His Louis Vuitton suitcases.
Speaker: They're like classic Louis Vuitton suitcases.
Speaker: They're like the brown with the gold LV pattern on them.
Speaker: um uh so and jacks and sonya are watching uh the ship arrive and it's like this creepy looking you know it's like a dragon pirate ship it's like yeah proper old-fashioned like kind of yeah like chinese yeah travel ship it's cool and uh kano is just like waiting in the shadows waiting until like sonya sees him go on the ship so that she'll follow and she does
Speaker: So, you know, they're on the ship now.
Speaker: Johnny meets Sonya Blade on the ship and she takes him in a headlock and she's like, where's Kano?
Speaker: And she has terrible trigger discipline here.
Speaker: She has her finger on the trigger.
Speaker: On the trigger, yeah.
Speaker: She's putting the gun too.
Speaker: Great martial arts is terrible markswoman.
Speaker: Yeah, just like, you gotta be careful with the gun there.
Speaker: We get Liu Kang making fun of Johnny some more, and we follow Sonya Blue Deck, where she meets Shang Tsung, who welcomes her aboard.
Speaker: And it's like, Shang Tsung is very clear about, she needs to be here.
Speaker: This is a question that the movie will never really answer as to why.
Speaker: To an extent.
Speaker: No, because that was the thing.
Speaker: I felt they didn't, but up until...
Speaker: Lambert, it's either in that scene because he appears or it's the scene where he saves them on the island where they're about to, because they fight a bunch of guys to techno and then more guys turn up but then so does Raiden and he basically says oh yeah that was the thing, like Lambert's voice in this, he sounds like he's doing a Peter Lorre impression
Speaker: So it's just kind of like, I put you guys together because you're the chosen warriors of Earthrealm.
Speaker: You're the chosen warriors of Earth.
Speaker: You're the chosen warriors.
Speaker: Earthrealm needs you.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So they do explain this.
Speaker: Basically, it's just like, hey, you won the cosmic lottery.
Speaker: You are the three guys that need to represent Earth in Mortal Kombat.
Speaker: It's like, bam, bam, bam.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: By the way, MVP of these scenes, Fog Machine.
Speaker: The Fog Machine is really the... Yeah, Dry Ice is really putting in the... Putting in the work.
Speaker: Yeah, Dry Ice really got its SAG membership that year.
Speaker: We're on a boat?
Speaker: Yeah, of course.
Speaker: There's fog all over.
Speaker: We don't need any... It's like a ghost ship, so of course there's just white ice everywhere.
Speaker: We don't need any water.
Speaker: We don't need to show the boat floating on water.
Speaker: Yeah, no, it's floating on a clair.
Speaker: Don't worry about it.
Speaker: Shang Tsung introduces her to Sub-Zero and Scorpion, and Johnny and Liu Kang come down and back her up, and there's just so much fog there.
Speaker: Sonya draws her gun on Sub-Zero, who then breaks it with a nice touch.
Speaker: Yes, it freezes the gun.
Speaker: Yeah, it freezes the gun.
Speaker: Scorpion's hand opens up to reveal...
Speaker: So the creative choice is to turn like his chain thing.
Speaker: It's like one of those little like dinosaur head grabber toys.
Speaker: Yeah, it is.
Speaker: It's a sock puppet.
Speaker: It's an evil sock puppet.
Speaker: It's a sock puppet.
Speaker: Or alternatively, Crow from Mystery Science Theater 3000 pops out of his head.
Speaker: Yeah, Crow comes out of his hand and starts cracking wise.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then Raiden or Raiden pronunciation differs depending on what era you're in.
Speaker: What character is saying it pretty much.
Speaker: What character is saying it shows up and shocks both of them into a wall and he tells Shang Tsung that fighting before the tournament is forbidden.
Speaker: And then he asks his fighters to follow him.
Speaker: It's good.
Speaker: It's got the John Wick thing when everybody said, oh, John Wick is good because, you know, it's nonstop action.
Speaker: But then they have the bit where they go to the Continental and they're not allowed to fight anyone.
Speaker: This film has that entirely blocked in of, hey, you know, fight.
Speaker: Hey, we got to do it by the rules, okay?
Speaker: Because that ultimately, not to spoil this film, I don't know if anyone's going to watch it.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: Ultimately, what Undone's Shang Tsung is that he has to follow the rules.
Speaker: He has to follow the rules.
Speaker: The rules are pretty straightforward, and you got to follow them or else it doesn't work.
Speaker: Yeah, and the other thing is, like, when you realize that the first 40 minutes of this movie are just like, we are just packing all the fucking exposition right in there.
Speaker: It's all plots.
Speaker: Let's get this out of the way because it's going to be gone.
Speaker: We're going to put all this plot, and then we're going to do fights.
Speaker: fights all the way through from there because yeah literally the moment they get off the boat they get to Thailand it turns into visual effects and no plot and all fights scenes all fights no plot you see the boat go through like a kind of like a like two cliffs facing each other and there's like a river running through it and there's like a big statue there
Speaker: Reminded me a bit of the shot from either Fellowship or Two Towers where there's the giant.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And again, it's New Line.
Speaker: So I'm kind of thinking is like, oh, are they thinking, is this a dry run to see how much they can get away with when Peter Jackson makes this?
Speaker: Yeah, maybe.
Speaker: How long was Peter Jackson engaged with New Line about Lord of the Rings?
Speaker: Because I know Peter Jackson had not done Frighteners yet.
Speaker: He hadn't done Frighteners, but he had written one of the Freddy sequels.
Speaker: They didn't use the script, but he was mates with them at this point.
Speaker: And I think they had thrown money at Heavenly Creatures or something.
Speaker: But I think he had been talking about doing the Lord of the Rings films since the late 97, 98.
Speaker: So a few years after this, it probably would have been around the time of Annihilation.
Speaker: Yeah, he probably would have started work on some of the pre-work.
Speaker: And I'm sure the feedback that they gave him was, we're good for sets, we're good for practical.
Speaker: You're going to put your money somewhere.
Speaker: Put it in the visual effects.
Speaker: Put it in the visual effects, please.
Speaker: Put it in the CG because they're not very good here.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, yeah, Raiden really does lay out the stakes very succinctly, as well as...
Speaker: really makes that that subtext text he points out what the character growth needed for each of the characters yeah i like that i like the fact that this is like uh paul anderson ws anderson is very much a kid of star wars if like he'd probably seen that in the 70s and that's inspired like every film he's made sense of well every character needs to have a flaw that they have to overcome but this is just way simpler because the literature character is going to say your problem no kang is that you'll feel guilty
Speaker: Your problem, Sonia, is that you want revenge.
Speaker: And you, Johnny Cage, you think you're foolish.
Speaker: So you have to all overcome this.
Speaker: And it's like, I know what you have to overcome, Crystal Lamp.
Speaker: Whatever the fucking voices you do, that's your age.
Speaker: It's like, does Paul Anderson like, I just imagine that Paul Anderson was like, nah, I'm going to let him roll with it.
Speaker: I want you to base your character on this and he probably handed him a tape but he didn't realize that he had accidentally recorded over it with an old Bugs Bunny cartoon where he had met a mad scientist who was just doing the Peter Lorre impression
Speaker: He's like, yeah, I handed him this tape of some of Orson Welles' best parts, but I guess I had taped over some Peter Lorre stuff that Bugs Bunny was doing.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Yeah, because Peter Lorre's in Malte's Falcon, but then what's the other one that he's in where he's like, at the beginning of the film, he's normal, but then at the end, he's like gone completely bonkers.
Speaker: And that's what every piece of Lorre impression is based on.
Speaker: I mean, yeah, there's a lot.
Speaker: The Peter Lorre impression is actually a... The one that pops into my head the most is actually from a radio play that he did with... It was the Cask of Amontillado,
Speaker: where he's always, he's like, but Montresor.
Speaker: I got some lovely wine.
Speaker: Just go behind the wall.
Speaker: Montiato.
Speaker: See that?
Speaker: He should have done that with Orson Welles, because Orson Welles loves a big bottle of wine.
Speaker: He loves a big bottle of wine!
Speaker: Loves the big bottle.
Speaker: I've seen him talk about the French champagne.
Speaker: The French champagne, he would have been down for it.
Speaker: Orson Welles is either Raiden or Shang Tsung.
Speaker: Oh, he could have been a good Shang Tsung, but literally he's just never... He's just always sitting.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But yeah, like imagine him saying flawless, literally.
Speaker: I was saying, we were talking about the actors earlier.
Speaker: I don't know who the guy was that played Shang Tsung, but I would say about, like, I think most people are there for Lambert and for the stunts.
Speaker: The guy who plays Shang Tsung, he is locked in.
Speaker: He is locked in.
Speaker: Yeah, I loved him.
Speaker: He knows what movie he's in.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Because it's like, because this is a kind of a stupid film in regards to like...
Speaker: Not one is based on Mortal Kombat, but they wanted to do a lot to get all the Mortal Kombat stuff in it, which we'll talk about when we get to Scorpion.
Speaker: But every time there's a fight and a guy gets defeated, they just cut to this Shang Tsung guy and he just goes...
Speaker: Flawless victory.
Speaker: So what's amazing is he has, I mean, he's, the guy has so many credits.
Speaker: Oh, I can imagine he's been like in a million Hong Kong and American.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: In Mortal Kombat 11, he did the voice of Shang Tsung.
Speaker: He plays, yeah, Shang Tsung.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: He was in Kubo and the Two Strings, one of my favorite movies of all time.
Speaker: Oh yeah, I looked this up.
Speaker: He was in the two biggest films that I knew of him that he was in was licensed.
Speaker: He's in licensed kills, so he probably would have just been like a heavy in one of those.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And he was also in Memoirs of a Geisha.
Speaker: Oh.
Speaker: Good for him.
Speaker: He was the guy who said,
Speaker: flawless victory in Memoirs of the Gage and Walker Texas Ranger he was the guy who said fatality I'll take your soul Norris
Speaker: But yeah, I mean, dude's been working.
Speaker: He starts out in Big Trouble in Little China in 1986 as an extra.
Speaker: And been working pretty consistently for, I mean, since then.
Speaker: I mean, I'll say he's the best part in this.
Speaker: He's locked in Great Shape.
Speaker: I don't know if he's doing all his own stunts or whatever, but... Yeah, most recent role was in Blue-Eyed Samurai.
Speaker: Which is on Netflix.
Speaker: An anime, I think.
Speaker: Yeah, an anime on Netflix.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: There we go.
Speaker: There it is.
Speaker: There it is.
Speaker: That's the episode.
Speaker: That's the episode.
Speaker: Wrapping it up.
Speaker: So yeah, no, Shang Tsung does some magic.
Speaker: We get a floating skull.
Speaker: We get snakes.
Speaker: We get more fog.
Speaker: And now they're in a different part of Thailand as the boat arrives, as we were saying earlier.
Speaker: We get a little bit of a funny bit of pratfall humor of Cage trying to get off the boat with all of his Louis Vuitton luggage.
Speaker: And he just like, he face plants into the water.
Speaker: That is commitment right there to the bit.
Speaker: He doesn't stumble into the bit.
Speaker: Everybody's really locked in at this point.
Speaker: Everyone is playing the classic Arthasites.
Speaker: He's Michelangelo.
Speaker: And Sonya is Raph.
Speaker: She's the ending.
Speaker: And then Liu Kang is, you know he's the protagonist of the film.
Speaker: He goes, is he the funniest one?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: Is he the smartest one?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: Is he the angriest one?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: So he has no traits to him.
Speaker: Oh, that must mean he's the lead of the film.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He's the most milquetoes guy going.
Speaker: He has no characteristics, so he is the lead.
Speaker: Hugo, he's the lead.
Speaker: He's your audience surrogate.
Speaker: You can fill him in like a big jug.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Sonia's radio isn't working and her compass won't point north.
Speaker: It's just spinning around and around.
Speaker: It's just spinning around and they all take a long walk up the stairs and we get more Johnny Cage.
Speaker: Which is a classic bit of visual effects where they do the zoom in where it's a normal pair of steps and then as they pull out they slowly replace it with a giant mat.
Speaker: With a mat.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Again, I was getting all the... Yeah, good matte painting work in this.
Speaker: I will say, a lot of the effects in this, almost all of the CG effects in this are god-awful.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: But there's a lot of good practical work that was done in this.
Speaker: Like I said, this is that crossover.
Speaker: This is the new line thing, because they did a lot of practicals for the Freddy's, and those are all good.
Speaker: Whenever they did early CG for the Freddy's, they looked bad.
Speaker: But... Yeah.
Speaker: But all they were kind of really waiting for was Jackson to be like, hey, look, I have put together a team in New Zealand that can do.
Speaker: Which I think was funnily enough, you mentioned Frighteners.
Speaker: I think it was that was by Wett's first big role.
Speaker: They did it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That was what they cut their teeth on in order to do the Lord of the Rings films.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: But yeah, all the practical stuff in this is good.
Speaker: And then you mentioned the CG because literally they get up to the tippy top and there's a bunch of really ugly statues there, one of which looks like Trogdor, which then comes to life.
Speaker: And it turns out that's Reptile, everyone's favorite character.
Speaker: It is the worst, like, Technicolor CG nightmare as he comes to life.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They're trying to do, like, the Predator effects of these slightly... Yeah.
Speaker: Because, yeah, you can turn translucent, like, in the games.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But, look, so... This and... Have you ever seen the Michael Jaiwai Spawn film?
Speaker: Oh, God, yeah.
Speaker: Oh, it's burned into my head.
Speaker: The CG effects in both those films are, like... They both, like, to me, are, like, this was the last time CG looked bad in film.
Speaker: Because then after that, yeah, you got, like...
Speaker: the matrix.
Speaker: They got serious about it.
Speaker: Basically.
Speaker: Oh guys, we figured it out.
Speaker: We found this.
Speaker: We, we, we found the luge that, um, James Cameron has that we can make CG look.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's like, it's like, guys, uh, what was it?
Speaker: The abyss was nearly 10 years ago.
Speaker: Why is it looking worse?
Speaker: How does this look worse than the abyss?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They had finally invented like art, like a nonlinear editor or like nuke at this point.
Speaker: It was like, Oh, composite.
Speaker: We can just do compositing easily now.
Speaker: We all have iMacs, we can just do this easily now.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, by the way, I don't know if you noticed, but every time Liu Kang, so we see the reptile transition, it's because Shang Tsung tells reptile to keep an eye on Katana.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Who Liu Kang makes eyes with.
Speaker: And every time Liu Kang and Katana make eyes, we get the sexiest fucking pan flute.
Speaker: Like just a little, little sexy pan flute just like rips right into it.
Speaker: To the extent of even fucking Johnny Cage calls it out of like, if a man looks at a woman like that, that only means one thing.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: And we get an eye roll from Sonya Blade and she's like, ah, man, this is the peak of... Ironically, though, because Katana is basically, because she is Shao, and again, this is all in the game, so she's Shao Kahn's daughter.
Speaker: And the thing is, she's almost a bit like Nebula from Guardians of the Galaxy.
Speaker: Her dad is the big bad, but she's going to turn go against him and help the good guys.
Speaker: Because I don't know if she just likes Earthrealm for some reason.
Speaker: She just doesn't like the things that the daddy is doing.
Speaker: Yeah, but you think that she's going to be like the Damsel in Distress character, but she's not.
Speaker: That ends up being Sonya Blade in a weird way.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: Strangely, Sonya Blade ends up as a Damsel in Distress.
Speaker: Spoilers for a few minutes from now.
Speaker: Spoilers for 20 minutes from five fight scenes from now, which will be 20 minutes long.
Speaker: Because then they go to the...
Speaker: The Hogwarts Banquet Hall was all I could think of when we got to this, where they decide to... If you didn't think that Sub-Zero and Scorpion were threats earlier, well, check this out, because...
Speaker: Yeah, what other guard guys just speaks up and Shang Tsung is just like, Sub-Zero, can you deal with it?
Speaker: Yeah, freezes him solid, crushes his head, and then Shang Tsung says, Flawless victory.
Speaker: Flawless victory.
Speaker: Flawless victory.
Speaker: I'm there for it.
Speaker: And they really just waste all that food.
Speaker: Yeah, no, exactly.
Speaker: After that, nobody's eaten it, which doesn't matter because then they somehow give all that food to Kano at Goro.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Goro are having the best conversation.
Speaker: Kano is just talking to Goro while eating a chicken leg.
Speaker: Goro lays down some exposition about the Shokan and the outworld.
Speaker: Kano's getting really uncomfortable with this whole thing.
Speaker: Goro spills the beverage all over Kano's lap.
Speaker: And then Shang Tsung arrives to warn Goro that Liu Kang is here and he is Kung Lao's descendant.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And Kung Lao is one of the dudes that was like, you know, really good.
Speaker: He was a really good Earthrealm fighter that probably could have won at some point.
Speaker: Now, for people who haven't seen this film or have ever played a Mortal Kombat game before, you might be asking, well, what does Goro look like?
Speaker: Well, Goro is like a nine foot guy with four arms.
Speaker: Now you're wondering, wow, how were they able to render this kind of character in a film in 1995?
Speaker: Well, good news is they did do it practically.
Speaker: The bad news is, according to all the side of the scene stuff, it was a massive pain in the ass.
Speaker: Yeah, they could only do it for like a minute at a time.
Speaker: It was a massive puppet animatronic thing.
Speaker: And the guy inside nearly died every time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, he was like Kenny Baker inside of RTD2.
Speaker: He kept dying of... Have you ever heard that story about Jack Nicholson in Ossichord's...
Speaker: when he did Batman, where he was like, I'll do the joke here, yeah, let's go on with it.
Speaker: And it turned out like he's one of the only people on Earth who is allergic to prosthetic, like, not latex.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, like, he's massively allergic to it, so they had to create new forms of face prosthetics in order to get the look that they wanted, because they couldn't just put liquid latex on his face.
Speaker: That is wild.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker: Yeah, and it does raise the question of how would you find that out?
Speaker: Because he was doing stuff like Cuckoo's Nest and a bunch of off-road ways.
Speaker: There was probably never a point of like, okay, so in this film, you know, it's about brothers and sisters, about family dynamics, but we're going to put monster makeup on your face, so hopefully you're not allergic to any of this.
Speaker: Sure, put whatever you want on my face.
Speaker: Everything was way too grounded in his career up until that point.
Speaker: Chinatown, originally, he was meant to have a monster face, but they couldn't do it.
Speaker: So Roman said, no, let's not.
Speaker: Let's not do that.
Speaker: We'll write that out.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Robert Town was really upset about having to.
Speaker: Yeah, if you read the original Robert Town book, Jake is actually a wolf man.
Speaker: You see, and he's...
Speaker: Jake and the Wolfman, the original title.
Speaker: Yeah, so we get a... All right, we're... Oh, okay.
Speaker: Shang Tsung does the warning.
Speaker: We lay out some more exposition about how Princess Katana should be on the throne by now because she's 10,000 years old.
Speaker: She must not be allowed to join with the Earthrealmers.
Speaker: We get more sexy pan flute as Princess Katana guides the Light Side Gang through a maze.
Speaker: Reptile spits in Liu Kang's eyes.
Speaker: Spits in Liu Kang's eyes.
Speaker: It's not a fatality, though, because it's not acid, I guess.
Speaker: Unlike the game where when Reptile spits, it's acid.
Speaker: They end up back where they were, except now they're on the... I forgot to mention that the good guys are listening to this entire conversation between Kano and Goro.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So they end up back in that room, but now they're on the first floor where the food was.
Speaker: And we get a fight scene.
Speaker: And it's the goons.
Speaker: A bunch of guards turn up, and you know a fight scene begins because they play the only song that's in this film, which is the Techno Mortal Kombat theme.
Speaker: They play that track every single time they have a fight.
Speaker: Every single time, they can.
Speaker: Does it ever get bad?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: No, it rocks.
Speaker: It rocks every time.
Speaker: They win.
Speaker: They beat up on all those dudes.
Speaker: And they're like...
Speaker: Yeah, we did it.
Speaker: And then more show up.
Speaker: But it doesn't matter because then also Raiden turns up.
Speaker: Raiden turns up.
Speaker: And Raiden is like, I'll kill all of them.
Speaker: You know, it's no bothering me.
Speaker: I can just kill all these guys.
Speaker: If I wanted to, I could just kill all these guys.
Speaker: so Raiden's like alright let's go let's get out of here I gotta I got some fine I gotta give you more exposition I gotta give you more exposition guys it turned out that the exposition is basically can't really fight unless you're doing more combat so save all your fights when you do that by the way you all have character flaws and you all have to get over them make sure you do that before the end of the film
Speaker: also Goro, it looks intimidating, but the most dangerous guy is Shang Tsung.
Speaker: So, you know, uh, they're both form Shang Tsung and Goro, both former champions for the out realm, uh, side.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: So the fights begin.
Speaker: It's the next day.
Speaker: The next day.
Speaker: And our first fight is Sonya versus Kano because Shang Tsung had told Kano, you can't do anything with Sonya Blade yet because you have to fight her in the tournament.
Speaker: There's a fight before that.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: There's Liu Kang against another dude.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, against a capoeira.
Speaker: A capoeira DJ type guy from Street Fighter.
Speaker: And every time the guy yells, they mix in a lion roar.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: On the audio.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, I forgot about that.
Speaker: Anyway, Liu Kang just beats him, and then Shang Tsung steps down from his... Yeah, Kong Tsung says, your soul is mine.
Speaker: Fatality.
Speaker: And sucks the guy's soul up.
Speaker: And then we get... And a terrible visual effect.
Speaker: Yeah, terrible visual effect.
Speaker: Then we get Sonya and Kano.
Speaker: And Kano is just supposed to toy with her, right?
Speaker: He's supposed to just embarrass her.
Speaker: He's supposed to knife.
Speaker: He's got a knife.
Speaker: He's like, this is a knife.
Speaker: This is the knife that killed your partner.
Speaker: Really choose the scenery, talking about how he killed her old partner, and then they fight.
Speaker: And then Kato...
Speaker: Is he not dead?
Speaker: I thought he died.
Speaker: Yeah, no, she breaks his neck with his thighs, but he just looks like he gets knocked out by it.
Speaker: He's not dead because Shang Tsung doesn't say anything.
Speaker: He goes, finish him, and then we get the little neck crack, and then... But then that's it.
Speaker: We don't know if he's dead or not.
Speaker: There's no soul.
Speaker: There's no soul sucking.
Speaker: There's no soul, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Does Kano show up in the next one?
Speaker: Which is one of the worst movies of all.
Speaker: Rate and review this podcast and let us know in your review whether he appears in Annihilation.
Speaker: Whether he appears in Annihilation.
Speaker: Am I going to watch Annihilation again?
Speaker: I watched it in 1997 when it came out.
Speaker: I don't think I need to.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: So did you, I was going to say, did you see this in 95?
Speaker: I did.
Speaker: It was a birthday party.
Speaker: Because I was going to say, we were pretty much of a Mortal Kombat head back in the day.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: I guess everybody was.
Speaker: Everybody was.
Speaker: It was the thing.
Speaker: Yeah, it was the edgy thing.
Speaker: And be like, oh my God, you get this game.
Speaker: Mortal Kombat.
Speaker: And then, you know, the movie comes out and we're, you know, being, it was a birthday party, I think.
Speaker: Me and a bunch of, it was, I guess, August, so it would have been my friend Eric's birthday that we went to see Mortal Kombat in the theater because his birthday was at the end of August.
Speaker: Yeah, we saw it in the theater.
Speaker: Me and a bunch of other 11-year-olds getting amped up by Mortal Kombat.
Speaker: If you like Mortal Kombat, it is like the awesome 11-year-old boy movie.
Speaker: Honestly, I was the audience.
Speaker: I was the target audience for this movie when it came out.
Speaker: This is me where it's like, I didn't, because I mean, not to age myself massively, I was full when this film came out.
Speaker: And then I've just seen it in bits and spits over the years.
Speaker: Mostly the thing that I appreciated watching this film as an adult was, man, this is quite a really good techno soundtrack.
Speaker: Like, not just the... Because I feel like a lot of people just hear the Mortal Kombat theme and they're just like, oh, techno's a joke, fuck this.
Speaker: But no, there's like a lot of really good deep cuts in this film, which we'll get to kind of get there.
Speaker: But it is like...
Speaker: No, like this was because people always say with the PlayStation, that was the console that kind of brought over, you know, dance music and EDM and stuff like that with like Wipeout or whatever.
Speaker: No, Sega were kind of on that.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Especially using it, even if it couldn't be in the games itself necessarily.
Speaker: It was, they're like, no, we're going to release an album that goes with these games.
Speaker: Like this is the music, you know, that really sells it.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: And, you know, this song would get played at sporting events.
Speaker: I mean, it does get you amped up.
Speaker: It does get you amped up.
Speaker: It gets you pretty happy.
Speaker: Meanwhile, Johnny Cage is down the woods.
Speaker: My favorite scene is this film because it happens so frantically, which is that all these tournaments are happening in, like, little fight scenes.
Speaker: And then we just cut to Johnny Cage.
Speaker: He's just having a nice walk for a bamboo field.
Speaker: and he gets attacked by scorpion yeah he's wearing tan slacks and a blue shirt and he just looks like he's lost and yeah scorpion turns up and like uh like johnny ducks and dives he does the dodgeball d's around some trees because scorpion throws the get over here chain snake um which i believe is ed boon is the is the voice of the voice scorpion okay yeah
Speaker: So he like dives, the snake gets wrapped up in the trees and Scorpion pulls it back and then he throws it again and Johnny Cage like ducks out of the way and splats it against a tree, just like explodes.
Speaker: And then Scorpion's like, ah, I'm out of here.
Speaker: And he starts to like do a little teleportation thing.
Speaker: Yeah, he creates a warp portal and for some reason Johnny Cage either gets sucked through or jumps into it.
Speaker: He shadow kicks into the Warp Portal.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, that's right.
Speaker: He does a shadow kick into it.
Speaker: And he ends up in, I assumed it was Hell, but it looks like the depraved Chasm from fucking Demon's Souls.
Speaker: It is all rickety scaffolding and it looks like Blighttown.
Speaker: Yeah, which it's amazing, though, because it's like, oh, OK, well, you know, I feel like Mortal Kombat is...
Speaker: at least mortal combat 2 had location changes sometimes yeah um so now they're in a different they're in a second location and we have a pretty a pretty cool fight between johnny cage and scorpion on the scaffolding um where they you know they're going back and forth and eventually the scaffolding collapses collapses and they're like kind of yeah it's sort of like yeah when you drop down a level and you were kind of like in all sorts but because yeah this area is like full of like skeletons and like fallen warriors and stuff and you go yeah
Speaker: And this is a really cool scene.
Speaker: I hope it doesn't get ruined by a really bad visual effect.
Speaker: Yeah, Scorpion's going to take his mask off and reveal a weird looking... He has a spooky skeleton.
Speaker: A spooky scary skeleton on his head and he tries to breathe fire.
Speaker: He breathes fire like his fatality.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then Johnny finds a shield from an older warrior on the ground and he blocks the fire.
Speaker: And then he runs up to Scorpion.
Speaker: And because the shield has like spikes on the edge, he just like starts slicing Scorpion up and like slices his head in half.
Speaker: And it's like it is the goriest thing in the game, in the movie, basically.
Speaker: As you say, they can get away with it because he's like a monster, essentially.
Speaker: Yeah, he's a monster, so they can get away with this, especially when he slices half of Scorpion's skull open, and it's like there's fire inside, and then Scorpion explodes.
Speaker: He sure does.
Speaker: It's hinted that Scorpion had an autograph from Johnny Cage on his person.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I didn't really get that.
Speaker: Because when he explodes and the bones go everywhere, like a photo of Johnny Cage.
Speaker: This is a signed photo of Johnny Cage.
Speaker: Your biggest fan.
Speaker: Pretty good.
Speaker: I will say, I think if you were a fan, if you were like a mega fan of Mortal Kombat, because I had this thing of two things, which was one, why is Scorpion and Sub-Zero working for Shang Tsung?
Speaker: That's not great.
Speaker: And two, they're just the biggest jobbers in this film.
Speaker: They're straight-up jobbers, and they pay a little lip service earlier to it, where Shang Tsung is like, these two are mortal enemies, but I brainwashed them.
Speaker: Now they work for me.
Speaker: Okay, I guess that's one way to...
Speaker: to kind of take some of the complexity of the character dynamics out of it.
Speaker: And also explain why they're stupid now.
Speaker: They're just stupid.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They don't even know how their own powers work.
Speaker: Next, Liu Kang is scheduled to fight Katana.
Speaker: So he gets some sexy pan flute and they kind of like wrestle around with each other.
Speaker: And Katana gives...
Speaker: She gives him a top tip.
Speaker: A secret tip.
Speaker: And he doesn't have to turn the book upside down to read it.
Speaker: Or read it in a mirror.
Speaker: Read it in a mirror.
Speaker: He gets a secret tip and Chang Sung is so annoyed with them.
Speaker: Yeah, he's so angry.
Speaker: He's like, oh, fuck this.
Speaker: I'm stopping the fight.
Speaker: I'm really disappointed.
Speaker: I'm so annoyed.
Speaker: Just stop fighting.
Speaker: Please leave.
Speaker: This sucks.
Speaker: um he stops it right before they start making out uh ray rayden is inside uh so basically the tip she gives him is like use the element that gives when you fight your next opponent use the element of life basically you go okay so what's that gonna be
Speaker: His next tournament is in the spookiest dungeon you've ever seen.
Speaker: And meanwhile, Raiden is dressed as a monk putting a bucket of water there for some reason.
Speaker: And Raiden's like, and walks away.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then a bunch of monks bring Liu Kang down where he's named to
Speaker: fight sub zero sub zero they fight and then sub zero starts doing some real ice bullshit and then lu and then lu kang looks at katana and katana's off in the in the like in the corner and we get a voiceover of her flying from the previous scene use the elements of life and he goes oh i know what to do here in the only bit of the film that i don't particularly love but it's like i mean they gotta get this out whatever
Speaker: So it turns out that the tip was to basically use Sub-Zero's abilities against him, which is that Sub-Zero's basically creating a giant polar vortex around him.
Speaker: And he notices that some water on the floor is starting to freeze, like the puddle's starting to freeze, and he goes, oh, I know what to do here.
Speaker: Picks up the bucket, throws it through the polar vortex, and it turns into a giant icicle that then kills Sub-Zero.
Speaker: Sub-Zero basically is killed by his own powers.
Speaker: He's killed by his own power.
Speaker: Oh, Sub-Zero.
Speaker: And then he gets frozen to the wall and dies.
Speaker: Yeah, he gets frozen solid and it's just like, man, you were the jobbiest of the jobbers because you got undone by your own abilities.
Speaker: He is a pro wrestler who doesn't even have his own entrance music when he comes to the ring.
Speaker: He'll come from commercial break and he's already standing in the ring.
Speaker: Pretty much, yeah.
Speaker: So Shang Tsung is pissed off because his two, two of his aces are dead.
Speaker: And Kano is maybe dead or alive.
Speaker: We don't know.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Sleeping.
Speaker: So he goes to Goro.
Speaker: Now it's Goro's time.
Speaker: And we just get a montage of competitors.
Speaker: Yeah, I love this.
Speaker: Because it's like, they can't move the model.
Speaker: So it's like, Goro, Kano.
Speaker: So they just cut, it's like a comedy shot.
Speaker: You just see Goro.
Speaker: second cuts of just stuntmen being flown off screen you could make a montage of this but you just loop it for like an hour of just like guys getting like you hear the pun sound effect oh oh oh like that it's like it's like verges on like too many cooks level of absurdity and
Speaker: It does look, yeah, very bird up for anyone who's ever seen what's-his-face, Eragon-Drey.
Speaker: It's how this is edited, but yeah, you have to just suspend your disbelief that Goro is destroying all those guys.
Speaker: Granted, you then do see him fight Jax, which I watched this on Amazon Prime, and that character apparently isn't Jax.
Speaker: They gave him a different name.
Speaker: No, no, no, it's not Jax.
Speaker: It's a guy named Art.
Speaker: Oh, it's not.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: It's a guy named Art something.
Speaker: Art something.
Speaker: It's Art Spiegelman.
Speaker: It's the guy who drew Mouse.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: The creator of Mouse is there, and he's fighting Goro.
Speaker: He's fighting Goro, and he does not have a good time.
Speaker: What's funny is, like, they have to make the guy fighting against Goro look nearly incompetent in order for this fight to work.
Speaker: Because Goro is so... The Goro puppet is so stiff that it's like, why isn't he just kicking Goro in the legs?
Speaker: Because it's...
Speaker: Art Lean is the guy's name.
Speaker: So yeah, Art Lean is fighting.
Speaker: It's really the only full Goro fight that we get.
Speaker: And then it's not great.
Speaker: He just throws Art Lean around and then he has the latest, lamest fatality of all time where he just picks Art up and then goes bop and bops him on the head.
Speaker: And Shang Tsung sucks up Art's soul into his eyeball.
Speaker: Eyeball, yeah.
Speaker: And a bad visual of Art.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So... We get another scene then of Raiden saying you've got to get over your character flaws.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They all say no.
Speaker: Sonya Blade screams no.
Speaker: Johnny Cage screams no at different times.
Speaker: Raiden shows up and gives another I know authors who use subtext and they're all cowards speech to the group.
Speaker: It says, guys, you really need to get over your character flaws.
Speaker: You really need to get over these character flaws.
Speaker: I don't know what else to tell you.
Speaker: Uh, uh, Liu Kang has a nightmare about his brother's death again while meditating.
Speaker: And Sonya Blade and Johnny Cage are talking about Goro and Cage is like, I'm just going to challenge him.
Speaker: Uh,
Speaker: So that Sonya doesn't have to fight him.
Speaker: And Sonya's like, don't do that.
Speaker: And Johnny Cage is like, I'm doing it.
Speaker: And Shang Tsung, he does.
Speaker: He goes to Shang Tsung and he's like, yeah, you can fight Goro right now.
Speaker: In exchange, I get to choose...
Speaker: I get to fight the winner and I, or I get to choose the final fight of the event at a location of my choosing.
Speaker: And Raiden's like, ah, what are you doing?
Speaker: Johnny's like, I'm taking charge.
Speaker: And, and Raiden's like, after Johnny leaves, Raiden's like, ah, at least one of them is finally learning.
Speaker: Finally, he's getting over his big character flaw, but in a way that might jeopardize the entirety of Earthrealm.
Speaker: It might jeopardize the mission, but he's getting over his character flaw.
Speaker: And that's really all Elder God.
Speaker: That's the real mission.
Speaker: That's mission A. Mission B is saving Earthrealm.
Speaker: Yeah, save Earthrealm.
Speaker: I mean, Raiden's a god.
Speaker: It's not like they're going to do anything to him.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: The best moment, so they have the Goro-Johnny Cage fight set up, and then the best moment of the movie happens when Goro is about to take a swing, and Johnny Cage does a split, which nobody else in the movie has done.
Speaker: Nobody has done a split, and Johnny Cage does a perfect split and punches Goro right in the Jimmy Johns.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: She causes Goro to grab his hurtie area and bend over and everyone to go, ooh, that's got to hurt.
Speaker: Ooh, that's got to hurt.
Speaker: And Goro is really going... They really took years off of the puppeteer's life just to give Goro like... Yeah, that was...
Speaker: A minute of going, uh.
Speaker: Yeah, several Henson family members have not recovered from having to animate.
Speaker: The Jim Henson puppet shop.
Speaker: Yeah, there's some graves out back.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So there's like, it's like the unlucky Kennedy's there's unlucky, like there's unlucky Henson's.
Speaker: You had to have this guy, but that makes him so angry that Johnny Cage then runs away.
Speaker: He just runs away.
Speaker: He runs away and he runs out and he high, he goes down to a cliff and he kind of like hides.
Speaker: And then Goro comes outside and he's like, ah, um, and then cage gives him a jump kick and a punch and he knocks Goro right off the cliff.
Speaker: Turns out that was the trick to defeating Goro was finding the world's most precarious cliff face and kicking him off it.
Speaker: Yeah, because Goro, not well balanced.
Speaker: He's got too much... No, he's a tall guy.
Speaker: Tall guy, too much torso.
Speaker: Yeah, true.
Speaker: Yeah, his center of mass is all foot because he's got too many arms.
Speaker: So Shang Tsung wastes no time in kidnapping Sonya Blade.
Speaker: He knows what's going on.
Speaker: Um...
Speaker: He's like, I'm taking her, I'm fighting her, we're going to the Outworld at the Emperor's Castle, and he fucks off.
Speaker: And then Johnny Cage and Liu Kang are like, we gotta go for her, and they leave Rydin behind.
Speaker: Rydin says, I can't come with you.
Speaker: This is my zone, and they said, that's fine, we don't need your help, we've overcome our character flaws.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: As they go through, we get an early CGI shot of a bad CGI shot of the tower.
Speaker: And what's what's amazing is that it's like it's this bad shot of the tower and, you know, it's bad because there's no ease on the camera.
Speaker: No, it's just it's just like, well,
Speaker: He was like, you didn't keyframe it.
Speaker: And be like, whatever.
Speaker: It took five years to render.
Speaker: We haven't invented keyframes yet.
Speaker: We're using video toasters.
Speaker: We haven't got that technology yet.
Speaker: We haven't gotten that technology yet.
Speaker: We can't be using yet.
Speaker: So it's like the camera's just like panning, tilting down the tower.
Speaker: And it just like goes wham.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Huh.
Speaker: So they're walking through the desolate wasteland of Outworld.
Speaker: Which basically is just Thailand at night.
Speaker: They just found a bit of Thailand that they could throw some rubble around.
Speaker: It's like, we just need a street clear.
Speaker: We're going to light some trash cans on fire and go to town.
Speaker: And there's all these, like, statues of crucified bodies, basically.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So Reptile attacks them, and Liu Kang throws Reptile into the chest cavity of one of these crucified bodies, which then absorbs Reptile and turns him into the ninja version of Reptile.
Speaker: Yeah, it turns him into Ninja Reptile from the game.
Speaker: Yeah, it didn't really...
Speaker: I don't get this scene, this sequence.
Speaker: You're like, I feel like we could have just started.
Speaker: We didn't need him.
Speaker: I feel like you could have cut 10 minutes out of it.
Speaker: It felt like they had like a mandate of you have to have seven fight scenes in this film.
Speaker: Yeah, it was like we're short one fight scene.
Speaker: We need Reptile.
Speaker: John Tobias and Ed Boon would just shout at him.
Speaker: You have to have a fight with Kano.
Speaker: You have to have a fight with Reptile.
Speaker: You have to do all these characters.
Speaker: Okay, fine.
Speaker: They've got to do reptiles, so they just found a place in the film that they could just quickly put a reptile fight in.
Speaker: And it's like, it's totally disconnected because they end up in another room to do this fight.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, it's a lot of... I'm trying to think of a recent film that did this, but it's a lot of people being kicked through walls and drywall getting blown everywhere.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So they end up in this other room, which basically looks like...
Speaker: It looks like the set that we just left in Earthrealm just with different lighting.
Speaker: Yeah, with people lighting, basically.
Speaker: So... This is the realm where all the white ice comes from, by the way.
Speaker: Everything is just covered in a layer of smog.
Speaker: This is the realm of white ice, yeah.
Speaker: So, yeah...
Speaker: They fight and he rips the reptile back out of his chest, I guess.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's now just regular reptile again.
Speaker: And then he like, he kills reptile and Katana shows up and says, well done.
Speaker: You're finally learning.
Speaker: How to kill reptile.
Speaker: How to kill reptile.
Speaker: Katana then lays out some exposition about how Outworld wasn't always like this.
Speaker: It also lost 10 Mortal Kombat and Shao Kahn took it over.
Speaker: killed her parents and adopted her to lay claim to the throne and then uh lu kang will face three challenges in the tower when he gets in there his enemy himself and his worst fear honestly didn't need this because it you're like oh oh we're getting to himself oh we skipped it basically he fights turns out that those three things just end up being one guy which is he fights shang song
Speaker: Yeah, it's a three-phase boss fight.
Speaker: So they also do the Star Wars thing of, oh, we need to wear disguises to get in.
Speaker: But it's like literally a second of just, they come down in robes.
Speaker: You see Sonya Blade kidnapped, and he's just like, oh, I guess that's the end of the tournament.
Speaker: I guess I won.
Speaker: They're like, not so fast.
Speaker: And they take their hoods off.
Speaker: And that was pre-heroes.
Speaker: And he goes, Shang Tsung goes, oh, I want to fight Johnny Cage.
Speaker: And Liu Kang says, I don't think so.
Speaker: Rules of the tournament says that, you know, whoever's on bottom rung or whatever can challenge the head of the tournament.
Speaker: And that's what I want to do.
Speaker: I want to fight you.
Speaker: Fine, rules are rules.
Speaker: If I want to follow the rules, I will, then.
Speaker: uh yeah uh theme again world combat theme uh they fight lu kang makes shang bleed his own blood which shang is very upset about uh shang then ups then uses some of his souls to channel uh yeah he brings he brings some random warriors back to life who then pop out of the mortal combat logo that they're fighting on
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So there's like eight random warriors.
Speaker: Liu Kang takes care of them pretty quickly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's why they're dead.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's why they're dead.
Speaker: And Katana, meanwhile, is off in the corner.
Speaker: It's like, face your enemy.
Speaker: And she's like narrating the challenges.
Speaker: And it's like, face yourself.
Speaker: And facing yourself is Shang Tsung being like, give up.
Speaker: And Liu Kang being like, no.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: There we go, easy, that's another one done, and then Face Your Greatest Fear, which is fucking Shang Tsung turns into his brother, and it's meant to be that thing in a film of like, oh, is my brother back to life, or is it a trick?
Speaker: But Liu Kang watched this happen, so he's just like, well, I know that you're not my brother, so what the fuck, like...
Speaker: What are you doing, Shang Tsung?
Speaker: This story beat isn't going to work, bud.
Speaker: I've just seen what you've done.
Speaker: I watched you do it.
Speaker: Yeah, you don't feel sorry that I died in the sight.
Speaker: I don't, but you're not my brother.
Speaker: You're fucking Shang Tsung.
Speaker: I know what you're doing here.
Speaker: Liu Kang just then gets the upper hand and combos Shang into the spike pit.
Speaker: By the way, the spikes grew up out of the ground while they were fighting.
Speaker: While they were chatting.
Speaker: While they were chatting.
Speaker: And it releases all the souls in a giant beam of light.
Speaker: And then Liu Kang says, flawless victory.
Speaker: And Shang Tsung turns into a funny mommy.
Speaker: All of his good looks go away.
Speaker: They all disappear.
Speaker: And Liu Kang's brother now really shows up.
Speaker: He's dead still, but he's a ghost.
Speaker: And he's like, hey, you know, we'll see each other someday, but I'm always going to be with you.
Speaker: And then he fucks off.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I was going to say, this is the only good, like, this is the only thing that gets us close to being, like, a good part of this film is, yeah, like, his brother being, like, just kind of like, hey, you know, we'll meet each other in another life, but I will always be with you.
Speaker: While this, like, orbital track is playing in the background, like, one of their best songs is playing in the background, then cuts to the Shaolin children running peacefully.
Speaker: And it's just, yeah, and it is just kind of like, wow, the day is saved, that's it.
Speaker: or is it raiden first goes oh what took you so long and then the emperor decides to show up and uh shao khan uh-oh shao khan is here shao khan played by because we were talking about scooby-doo earlier played by frank welke
Speaker: Yeah, I was watching this on Amazon and they gave me IMDb X-Ray and the guy who was in the Shao Kahn costume doing the voice is Frank Welker.
Speaker: That is amazing.
Speaker: He's come for their souls.
Speaker: And then I forget who says it.
Speaker: One of them says, I don't think so.
Speaker: Is it Sonya Blade?
Speaker: I think it might have been her.
Speaker: And they all do go into a fight stance.
Speaker: And then the logo appears again.
Speaker: And then the techno music plays over the credits.
Speaker: And that's the movie.
Speaker: That's 1995's Mortal Kombat.
Speaker: It's like, boom, 90 minutes, just about 90 minutes.
Speaker: We got a bunch of fight scenes.
Speaker: We get pretty much, pretty relatively lore accurate to the game.
Speaker: In fact, the games then take a bunch of things from the movie and implement it, including... Yeah, Mortal Kombat 9 puts a bunch of stuff in from the film, which I think is good.
Speaker: It even looks like a lot like it, which I think is nice.
Speaker: Like, they do a lot to just...
Speaker: sort of ground these things together.
Speaker: And yeah, like I said, like, I mean, we've kind of made fun of it and said I'll cheat the visual effects a little bit.
Speaker: It's like, this is solid.
Speaker: Like, it's not like you would, you wouldn't put it on like your letterbox top four or whatever of like greatest films ever made.
Speaker: But for what it is, which is essentially a tournament movie with some horror, like kid-friendly horror elements in it.
Speaker: It's fine.
Speaker: It's not bad.
Speaker: It's the video game version of, let's say, Karate Kid.
Speaker: Yeah, or like Game of Death or something like that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It is like a... I mean, and it's funny because a lot of the stunt guys on this are all like ancient Hong Kong action movie guys.
Speaker: Like a lot of them have been working with Jackie Chan and whatever.
Speaker: So all of the combat stuff is legit.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: In it.
Speaker: And you do get a lot of that.
Speaker: It's just, it also has to do the Mortal Kombat thing of you introduce some characters.
Speaker: You have some supernatural characters where, again, in Sub-Zero and Scorpion's case, they're kind of jobbers.
Speaker: But, you know, Goro for the most part, they do pretty well with him.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The Goro puppet, it like...
Speaker: It looks good.
Speaker: It looks good and it moves better than you, it moved better than I remembered it moving.
Speaker: Yeah, the facial animation is good, but it is stiff.
Speaker: For some reason, I was like, I remember in my head, it was like, was Goro stop motion?
Speaker: No, he was not.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: I think, yeah, it's maybe it's one of the late, maybe Annihilation either does a stop motion Goro.
Speaker: They have like a visual effect Goro that looks kind of stop motion.
Speaker: But yeah, I was thinking that I think I might have just been thinking of like a Ray Harryhausen Gorgon because that's kind of what he's based on.
Speaker: He's a straight up puppet.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So yeah, that's Mortal Kombat 1995.
Speaker: You know, we're not a blank check, but would you want to play the box office game?
Speaker: Ooh, yeah.
Speaker: You'll have to give me a bunch of clues.
Speaker: I'll give you a bunch of clues.
Speaker: We'll just do top five of its release weekend.
Speaker: So I think I looked this up.
Speaker: So this was number one in the box office when it came out.
Speaker: So obviously you don't have to guess that one.
Speaker: But number five that week...
Speaker: It's Universal Pictures, widely considered, this is 1995, widely considered a massive, massive, massive flop for its lead.
Speaker: Is it Waterworld?
Speaker: It is Waterworld.
Speaker: Wow, Kevin Costner's.
Speaker: flop on the ocean yeah it was it had been out for uh it still was in like 2400 theaters it had been out for four weeks had made 70 million dollars but what was waterworld's budgets but i think the problem oh it's budget was near 175 million which was absurd yeah because it was all yeah because everything was built on water it was all yeah super yeah
Speaker: So number four, this is a Warner Brothers movie.
Speaker: It's a comedy romance.
Speaker: I'll give you the tagline or the synopsis.
Speaker: A woman's world is rocked when she discovers her husband is cheating on her.
Speaker: Oh, who's the lead?
Speaker: The lead is Julia Roberts.
Speaker: Julia Roberts.
Speaker: And the other lead is Dennis Quaid.
Speaker: Oh, is that what's going to?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because it's not you got mail because that's a little bit.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: It's not sleepers in Seattle because that's Tom Hanks.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't know if I would get this one.
Speaker: I mean.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's it's a tough it's a it's a bit of a deep cut.
Speaker: It is something to talk about.
Speaker: Starring Dennis Quaid and Julia Roberts.
Speaker: Next, number three is a 20th Century Fox picture.
Speaker: It had been out for two weeks thus far.
Speaker: Let's see.
Speaker: Okay, and it is... Paul Sutton, a young married soldier, befriends a pregnant lady who has petrified her father with a sonor.
Speaker: and agrees to pose as her boyfriend.
Speaker: As time passes, they start growing fond of each other.
Speaker: I've never heard of this film before.
Speaker: Starring Keanu Reeves.
Speaker: Oh.
Speaker: Oh, and it's a 90s Keanu as well.
Speaker: It's after Point Break.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Before The Matrix.
Speaker: Yeah, post-Point Break, pre-Matrix.
Speaker: And he plays a soldier who's pretending to be somebody's
Speaker: Yeah, and it's kind of a period piece, looks like.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't think I'm going to get this.
Speaker: A Walk in the Clouds.
Speaker: This is the year of just films that no one will remember apart from Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat.
Speaker: Yeah, this one you might know, though.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Okay, so number two.
Speaker: It was the number one the previous week before Mortal Kombat comes out.
Speaker: It's a Walt Disney picture, but that might be a little bit of a... That might throw you off a little bit.
Speaker: The plot is Luann, a retired U.S. Marine, becomes a teacher in a Californian high school, but her mostly Latino and black students from an impoverished and racially segregated locality do not easily embrace her.
Speaker: I can't remember the name of the film, but I know Coolio's Gangster's Paradise is on the soundtrack.
Speaker: You know, Gangster's Paradise is part of the soundtrack.
Speaker: God, is it called something education or like something like that?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: Yeah, because the actress as well is like Kim Basinger or something like that.
Speaker: It is Michelle Pfeiffer.
Speaker: Michelle Pfeiffer, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Oh.
Speaker: I know the film, but I do not know the movie.
Speaker: It is Dangerous Minds.
Speaker: Dangerous Minds.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The other movies that were in the top 10 that week, number six was Babe.
Speaker: These are movies that you probably would have gotten had you heard there.
Speaker: Yeah, Babe.
Speaker: Babe, The Net, Apollo 13, and also opening that week, The Babysitter's Club.
Speaker: And number 10 was A Kid in King Arthur's Court.
Speaker: Arthur's Court.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And you know what?
Speaker: There was a lot of movies.
Speaker: I feel like we just had more movies out at any given time.
Speaker: Yeah, what do you think?
Speaker: Because we all know Virtuosity was out still.
Speaker: Clueless.
Speaker: nine months uh casper and pocahontas that rounds out the top 15 and it's weird to think of those because virtuosity is a film that i always think is like older i mean have you ever seen it yeah it's been a long time it's been a minute but it's been a minute but you know denzel washington plus virtual reality how can i do
Speaker: And it's like one of the first American films of Russell Crowe in it who plays a online computer via a serial killer who then manages to make his way into the real world.
Speaker: And so Washington has to stop him.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: What a plot.
Speaker: What a plot.
Speaker: At the bottom of the list was after 13 weeks, number 23 was Braveheart.
Speaker: And it's 13th week, coming in at number 23.
Speaker: So, yeah, we'll do one more thing before we end this episode.
Speaker: James, what are you playing?
Speaker: Oh, what have I been playing?
Speaker: Quite a few things at the moment.
Speaker: I guess I will pull out two, which is...
Speaker: One of them is a demo for a game that might be out by the time this episode is called Uncle Chops Rocket Shop, which is described by the developers as being a rogue-lite spaceship repair simulator.
Speaker: But basically it's cool, it's like a little side-scrolling adventure game for the most part where you play as a fox-headed alien who lives on a kind of a backwards planet.
Speaker: But to make money and basically to pay rent and stuff, you have to fix... Like, people bring their spaceships over like it's a repair kind of banish.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Something's fucked up.
Speaker: Look at it.
Speaker: And all of the components are like kind of WarioWare minigames.
Speaker: So like to do an oil change you have to pull up the bonnet, you have to replace, you have to clean out the oil and replace it.
Speaker: You have to like check for fractures or like replace pieces and stuff like that.
Speaker: And on the hardest mode you do it against the clock as well.
Speaker: So it's kind of got this nice thing if you have to do the correct checks and all that sort of stuff while also doing it in time to make enough money.
Speaker: And
Speaker: Yeah, it's just a cool little game.
Speaker: I really like kind of touchscreen interface-y stuff, and I quite like how they've made it work here.
Speaker: You know, you have tools, like you have a wrench that you have to, like, you know, hold up and down, lefty-righty, all that sort of stuff.
Speaker: And it's neat.
Speaker: It gives you a book so you can diagnose stuff, but for the most part, it's one of those things that the more you play it and the more components you recognize, the better you get at it.
Speaker: And it's got that kind of, like, nice roguelike thing of...
Speaker: Yeah, you just kind of learn through experience.
Speaker: So that's been really good.
Speaker: And the other game that I've been enjoying as well is another demo, and that's called Parking Garage Rally Circuit.
Speaker: And I don't know if you've seen any footage of this.
Speaker: I got into it because the developer of it who made a game years ago called Jelly Car, which was like one of those physics-based kind of trials games where you play as a car made out of jelly and it's like you have to get to the end, but it's all wobbly physics stuff.
Speaker: he's done a similar kind of physics driven game here but it's based on like sega style sega rally daytona usa stuff right and its unique selling point is it's races that happen in parking garages so it's all about really tight turns and like hitting boosts and stuff and it's like really fun it looks like the aesthetic is spot on like you can change it between if you want to make it look like a satin game with like
Speaker: wobbly polygons and stern lines or if you want to make it look super sharp and high res or whatever it's really cool i think the the full version of that should be out maybe sometime this year but there's no announcement for that but yeah it's been a um riches of plenty in the indie space at the moment yeah it's awesome what about you though
Speaker: Right now, I'm currently playing Tactical Breach Wizards, which... Ooh, how is it?
Speaker: It's a lot of fun.
Speaker: It is a... Because it kind of takes that almost like a natural progression of the tactics game to a point where it's like, okay, well...
Speaker: It's basically a puzzle to be solved for the most part, because you have these wizards that you control, and one of them allows you, one of the wizard's powers, he has the ability of foresight.
Speaker: So you can plan out a turn, and then you can use his foresight to see how the turn will play out.
Speaker: And then you can kind of rewind and just keep doing it until it gets to a point where you really like it.
Speaker: But then after...
Speaker: You end your turn, you can't go back.
Speaker: Let's say you can't go back to another turn, but you can play around within a turn until you get it to the point where you really like it.
Speaker: It's a lot of fun.
Speaker: It's a cute game.
Speaker: It's got a fun little story.
Speaker: I know you had mentioned you were not a huge fan of the snarkiness of the writing, but I've had some laugh out loud moments.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's a cool world.
Speaker: Like, I like the fact that because it's developed by the guy who did Golden Point and Heat's signature.
Speaker: But like, right.
Speaker: I like the fact that it is very kind of blunt in regards to its magic basically stapled onto kind of like UK police procedural stuff.
Speaker: So it's right.
Speaker: Oh, we've got contraband mana and like, you know, all of the wizards are wearing like kind of yellow high-vis police jackets and stuff like that.
Speaker: They're still wearing like wizards.
Speaker: There's a wizard who is just like the traffic cop wizard.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Who casts a ghost car.
Speaker: And one of the main stats they count for you over the course of playing the game is defenestrations.
Speaker: because if you can defenestrate somebody or throw them out of a window, you don't have to whittle them down their health.
Speaker: It's an instant kill.
Speaker: And one of the wizards that you get somewhat early in the game, there's a third wizard.
Speaker: So far, it seems like you only ever have control of two in a mission, and it rotates between a couple of them.
Speaker: The third wizard you get has something called Death's Door, which allows her to open a window basically anywhere on a wall.
Speaker: So you can kind of get, so even if you're in a room where there's no windows, you can still get a defenestration.
Speaker: And according to that wizard, after an hour, it doesn't kill them.
Speaker: They just appear in the woods after an hour with an interest in becoming a finance bro.
Speaker: Um...
Speaker: She doesn't know where it sends them, but that's what happens.
Speaker: James, thank you so much for being on the episode today.
Speaker: Do you have any pluggables, anything you want to plug for me?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So you may have heard me through Kevin, the patient of the appearing on my podcast, Bulletside.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't know whether it may have been related to why you asked me to talk about a film, but we've been prototyping a couple of different mini-series and spin-offs of all the time on the channel.
Speaker: We did a mini-series on the three Transformers films that Michael Bay did in a series called Movies We Like.
Speaker: So I guess to promote something, if you want to hear me talk more about
Speaker: films not to the not as tight as this though but uh maybe a little bit too detailed a little bit goes off the deep end in some stuff about the free transformers films uh do check that out it is on uh you can find it on youtube under bullet time podcast you can also find it as part of the bullet time podcast on any podcast app of your choice but other than that you can always see i'm over on x well known as twitter outside mh-o-t-c-y-d-v-r
Speaker: So yeah, go ahead.
Speaker: Check that out.
Speaker: Before we go, I want to give a shout out to our Patreon $10 tier subscribers, Ruthless Mudder, Friendly Friend, Jesus Loves You, and Kyle Seaman.
Speaker: Thank you so much for being our $10 tier subscribers.
Speaker: If you want to go ahead and go over to patreon.com slash pixelitpod, you can join for free or you can join for a dollar.
Speaker: Get access to Phil's blog where he talks about the books that he is reading or $5 and you get access to our pre-show bonus episodes and the ad-free episodes.
Speaker: So go ahead, check that out.
Speaker: Otherwise, Pixelit is on X.com.
Speaker: slash Twitter, uh, Twixter.
Speaker: Uh, you can get us, find us on Instagram and you can find us on blue sky pretty much anywhere you think we should be.
Speaker: Just go ahead and put at pixel at pod in the search bar and we'll probably show up.
Speaker: So, uh, thank you so much for listening, everybody and have a good evening.
