The Mortal Kombatfranchise is known for its fights and brutal fatalities, and if the trailers are anything to go by, the upcoming reboot will be including a lot of those. A new featurette video has now been released, a week before the film’s official premiere, and offers fans a behind-the-scenes view of how some of the fight scenes were shot for the movie.
The clip includes interviews with director Simon McQuoid along with some of the cast members as they delve into how the team brought the fan-favorite Mortal Kombat champions and their unique fighting styles to life. Fans are offered new footage of Sub-Zero and Scorpion in action, along with a look at Kano, Sonya Blade, and Cole Young.
McQuoid offers fans the opportunity to understand how his team managed to honor the original 8-bit Mortal Kombat game characters and bring them to a “level that hadn't been seen before.” Throughout the video, he praises the actors for having the right abilities to portray the respective characters on screen, with a greater emphasis placed on Joe Taslim, who plays Sub-Zero, Hiroyuki Sanada, who plays Scorpion, and Lewis Tan, who plays Cole Young. The three characters, as seen in the Mortal Kombat trailer, seem to be at the center of the film’s plot, with their paths leading them to face each other eventually.
Taslim, a trained martial artist, was, in McQuoid’s opinion, the obvious choice for Sub-Zero. The actor was apparently “too fast” for everybody else on set, to the extent where the director had to ask him to “slow down for the cameras.” The actor is heard talking about how shooting a Mortal Kombat fight scene is very similar to any other one with dialogue, with the actors’ “agony, struggle, and pain” working as the unspoken words. McQuoid believes that Taslim and Sanada worked perfectly together, with both actors having the right amount of finesse to represent two of the most important characters in the franchise.
Tan, also trained in martial arts, will be seen playing the role of Cole Young, which has received a lot of criticism since the first Mortal Kombat trailer was released. Fans of the series did not seem to understand why a new character was being introduced while important characters like Johnny Cage weren’t being featured at all. However, in McQuoid’s opinion, Tan worked extremely hard to bring the role to life, as he “just did not stop.” With several scenes of the MMA fighter included in the featurette, it would be interesting to see how the character’s significance plays out in the film loaded with fight scenes. So much so that Ludi Lin, who plays Liu Kang in the film, revealed that there is “so much fighting in this film” that there were days the actors were jumping between shooting fight scenes, with absolutely no time to slow down.
Mortal Kombat has already received an R-rating, promising to portray the fatalities in their true brutal form. In the featurette, McQuoid refers to them as “sickeningly violent,” something fans of the game series will not find surprising, as they have witnessed hearts being ripped out of chests and throats being slit mercilessly. It remains to be seen how many of the most iconic fatalities from the games will make an appearance in the film.
Mortal Kombat is set to be released in theatres and on HBO Max on April 23rd, 2021.
Source: Warner Bros/YouTube