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If the first 13 minutes of the following month Mortal combat – that Warner Bros. recently made available to the selected press – are any indication, the new film adaptation of the seminal video game franchise is going to be a good time. (The emphasis is on “bloody,” although the good times might just roll with heads. As Nerdist’s Rosie Knight proclaimed: “We saw 13 minutes of Mortal combat and that’s perfect. “)
The opening sequence, captured with lush cinematography, looks a lot more like a bloody Ang Lee than it does Paul WS Anderson, who achieved the 1995 PG-13 ranking. Mortal combat. Set in feudal Japan, the scene finds Hanzo Hasashi, aka Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada), slicing up infantrymen after an attack on his family that leads to a clash with his all-time rival Bi-Han, otherwise known as Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim). The splash of blood at the start is something special – like a less populated The Bride vs The Crazy 88’s match by Quentin Tarantino. Kill Bill – and that’s just the prologue.
During a recent press event, director Simon McQuoid and producer Todd Garner said one of the biggest challenges in making the film is staying true to the source material and the gory nature of the game’s violence. , even in 8-bit, while avoiding the studio kiss of death which is an NC-17 rating.
“Nobody from the studio from top to bottom, nobody ever wanted to retire. Everyone wanted to do justice to Mortal combat. It was from day one so it was awesome, ”said McQuoid, a seasoned Australian commercial director who makes his feature film directorial debut with Kombat.
“What we had to be a little careful about was… you can get into NC-17 territory pretty quickly.” It’s different in a video game when they’re not real human beings. When you step into reality, a different set of things starts happening in your mind and you are rated slightly differently. So there were some things in the game that would mean the movie wouldn’t be streamable. And none of us wanted that. … So we were balancing that stuff all the time. And there are things you’ll see that really come close to the line because we didn’t want people to say, “Meh. Seemed a little lame. ”
Although fan-favorite characters for the game, first released in arcades in 1992 and later on Nintendo consoles, Sega Genesis and Gameboy, appear, the story centers around a new protagonist – Cole Young (Lewis Tan ), a caged MMA fighter unaware of his heritage who is drawn to the fantasy realm of Outworld after being hunted down by Sub-Zero.
The body count, as you might expect, is many levels above zero. “It’s not like there are hundreds of them, but there are enough,” McQuoid says. “It’s all part of the balance. If we had too many of them, it would start to take the film away from its introduction in this massive big cinematic version of the film. … It’s cinematic really beautiful and very authentic and very real. … This brutality has allowed us to be more authentic because it means that we don’t really need to hold back when someone has a kunai in their head. There would be a dull splash on the back, right?
“The blood is a big part of the film… but also the blood represents a family bond and a lineage. And so that’s part of the story. So I wanted to even elevate the idea of that to something you would feel because it’s kind of a more emotional connection.
By capturing this bloody brutality, it helped the director for the first time that one of the film’s producers, E. Bennett Walsh, had a lot of “blood” on his resume. He worked on both Kill Bill volumes with Tarantino, talking about The Bride and those unfortunate Crazy 88’s.
The filmmakers wanted to be as realistic as possible when it came to bleeding: “Using blood and using a blood splatter for that matter is handy where it can be,” says Garner, the veteran producer (Tag, XXX, 13 Continue 30) and former co-president of production at Disney. “It was only CG if there was no way to bring it into the plan or if we had to do it because of the production change, then we relied on CG a bit, but not very often.”
Again, it is a question of balance. The filmmakers had to thread the needle into the editing bay to avoid exceeding an R rating in NC-17 territory.
“We kind of blocked the landing once, luckily,” McQuoid says of the film’s submission to the rating committee. “We didn’t want to do too much and we couldn’t do too much.”
Mortal combat opens April 23.
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