Finish him!!!
Ethan Spaulding’s painting is full of humorous references to games, but is also filled with many scenes of unjustified violence. However, while the games have a coherent story, here you can see that the creators of the animations try to tell too many stories at once without focusing on a single plot. The Clash of the Kingdoms begins where the previous Scorpio movie started – that is, with the invasion of the Earth Kingdom led by Shao Kahn, who was very furious after defeating the Mortal Kombat tournament. But this invasion doesn’t last long as Shao Kahn finally proposes what you guessed would be another tournament. However, what I liked the most was Shaggy’s cameo from Scooby-Doo. Yes, you read that right, WB finally listened to our requests.
Liu Kang Star and all the rest
The Clash of the Kingdoms is, in a way, an origin story. Like in a Batman or Spider-Man reboot, we are immediately struck by the opening story of Liu Kang. The exposure of this warrior, however, is not that great, because we are also dealing, although to a lesser extent, with other characters. The storyline is the clash between Earthrealm and Outworld.
But just as an Outworld fighter does not need to know the name of his opponent from the Earth Dimension to fight him, the viewer does not need to know each character’s story to enjoy a good on-screen carnage, like tweaked footage from WWE. The director did not even forget about the famous game from the so-called Fatalities , which he also transferred to the screens. The final act of the film moves away from Mortal Kombat and is more like a good anime-style finale …
Quite a successful DVD release
As I have already mentioned, the multithreading of this film begs for the creation of four separate feature-length pictures. In return, we get 72 minutes of conglomerates of various, sometimes successful, sometimes not, plot threads. As a result, all the figures seem really colorless in places. Kung Lao, who is said to be Liu Kang’s brother, barely mentions a single line of dialogue with him; Stryker simply shows up with no explanation of how or why the normal cop finds himself fighting supernatural monsters; and Kitana says she has no choice but to follow Shao Kahn.
I like the animation. The backgrounds are gorgeous and do a great job of replicating the look of locations from games like Lin Kuei Temple from MKX and Kahn’s Arena from MK2. The character designs are much more polarized, characterized by heavily angular faces with chins that often look as sharp as some of the weapons they handle. Nevertheless, the heroes are faithfully reproduced in the series of games in which they appear.
As for the DVD itself, there are no special additions. The film itself is devoid of unnecessary dubbing, but we have a stereo voiceover, and also English dubbing in Dolby Digital 5.1. Of course, it is also possible to play a movie with Polish subtitles.
Quite a successful death ring
Comparing the animation to the recently released live-action movie Mortal Kombat is a big mistake. Personally, I think that both productions have their own unique charm, however, the animated medium shows something extraordinary. It is able to capture the uniqueness of the Mortal Kombat legend through the expression, the movements of the warriors and the sheer brutality of everything we love fighting for. Although the plot did not perfectly combine everything into one compact film, it is a story worth watching primarily because it can surprise us with its unpredictability and fidelity to the original. Therefore, I encourage everyone to buy this title on DVD, because this is the only way we can get to know it in Poland.
