Movies come in all shapes and sizes, with many of them being
adapted from other forms of entertainment and art. In the past three decades, video games have
been a growing source of inspiration for film.
With the recent release of Pixels,
direct adaptations are not the only things that are happening. The aesthetics and characters are being
re-appropriated for other uses in movies.
Pixels takes characters from
classic video games like Pac-Man and Q-Bert and pits the protagonists against
those game figures in a fight for the world.
The stories, what little there is, from those games aren’t the main
focus in the movie.
However, there are still numerous direct adaptations of
video games into film. The early
examples of video games in movies show many examples in which the story of the
games were used in order to provide a story for the movie. Though many of them differed in drastic ways,
such as Super Mario Bros., the basic
elements were still there. The heroes
and villains were there, and the core concepts were the same as they were in
the different entertainment form. Some
games were much easier to port over to film than others.
A tough type of game to bring to film seems to be the
tournament fighting game. There have
been countless games of this type released to the masses. There has been the Street Fighter series, the Mortal
Kombat series, the Tekken series,
and the Dead or Alive series among
the others that are out there. Each one
had their own pros and cons. But they
were essentially the same game concept.
You choose a fighter and you fight the other fighters until one stands
victorious. Usually it was tournament
style, or something sort of like a tournament.
Each of the four fighting franchises that I mentioned were adapted into
films, with varying degrees of success.
For the most part, adapting fighting games like these into
movies does not work. The stories, what
little there sometimes is, don’t necessary fit into a medium that isn’t
interactive. The action can translate
well, if done properly. That’s one thing
that the movies can get right. Yet there
are many more elements than the story and action that are needed for the
fighting games to work or not work.
Let’s take a look at some of the bits and pieces that bring success or
failure to adaptations of fighting games, through the lens of the two 1990s Mortal Kombat films.
Action
Obviously, the first and most important part of bringing a
fighting game to the big screen is going to be the action. The fighting has to be good to do well by the
title. Why else would you make the movie
if not to showcase the fighting that the game had inspired? Watching people punch and kick each other is
what audiences want to see from these movies.
Without some well-choreographed action, there is no entertainment value
in the fighting. Mortal Kombat takes it one step further and incorporates many of
the finishing moves that the characters have in the games. This adds a little something extra to the
action and makes the fights stand out more than they would with simple
hand-to-hand combat.
Characters
Fighting movies, like any sports movie, need someone for you
to root for and someone to root against.
There needs to be a good lead character (sometimes more) to follow along
their journey through what is normally a tournament style system. That character is the one that the audience
will ultimately want to survive and/or win the entire thing. There needs to be something likeable about
the character that the audience can latch onto.
Again, going back to Mortal Kombat,
you have Liu Kang, who is out for vengeance over his brother’s death in the
first movie. In Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, he is trying to save the world. Both are reasons to side with his character
as he goes up against the villain.
The villainous characters also need to have something
driving them that causes the audience to want them to lose. Whether it is some world threatening evil, or
corporate greed, something needs to be there to make a clean cut bad guy. Sure, threatening the life of the hero is
good, but the audience is going to want more.
They don’t only want to cheer for the hero. The audience wants to hate the villain so
that when they meet their end, there is something big that is prevented. In both Mortal
Kombat movies, that threat is the destruction of Earth. The bad guy wants to take over Earth for
evil.
Character Design
Along with the character’s motivations, fighting movies tend
to bring in some sort of design to help make the fights memorable. The fighting style of the characters can be
one way to differentiate them from one another and from fighters that are in
other franchises. Weapons are another
design choice that can set characters apart.
And of course there is also costuming.
A combination of these three elements of character design can make a
fighting movie that much more memorable.
Mortal Kombat has the ninja
characters, such as Scorpion. Scorpion
is a ninja with yellow clothing. That’s
your costuming. His weapons include a
chain-like thing that comes out of his hand to grab people. And he can burn them as a finishing
move. That’s your weapon and a fighting
move that make him different. Having
characters like that to freshen up a fighting movie can really help make the
experience more enjoyable.
Set Design
The location in which a fight takes place is very important
to the visual pleasantries of a movie. The
visual flare of the location can give new layers to a fight or help to make
simple choreography more entertaining.
This can also be seen in video games where each level looks different in
order to give variety to what the players are experiencing. As a player advances through the ranks and
fights different foes, they fight in different scenery. Sometimes there are dynamic features that
make the stages not only visually unique, but unique in gameplay as well. Translating that to film can make for fight
scenes that pop. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation utilizes this sort of scenery in a
fight between Scorpion and Sub-Zero.
There is an ice bridge over a broken bridge. The ice bridge collapses during the fight and
the two warriors use the broken bridge to their advantage. It looks interesting and makes the scene more
memorable.
The Tournament
Finally, there is the tournament itself. It needs to make sense. A tournament that doesn’t make sense is one
that is only going to confuse the audience.
There needs to be a blueprint to the tournament. There need to be rules for the tournament to
follow. You can’t simply have people
going out and fighting each other willy-nilly.
It needs some sort of a regimented system in place. Mortal
Kombat, the movie, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in the tournament
format. The battles simply end up being
whoever Shang Tsung wants to see fight.
Instead of having the bracket system that tournaments tend to stick to,
he picks two people that he wants. It
makes a jumbled mess of a plot, causing the viewer to disconnect from what is
happening.
Of course there are more basic concepts that have an effect
on how well made a movie may seem. The
dialogue, acting, direction, and choice of music are as important as any of the
characteristics that I wrote about. I
chose the ones I chose because of how much they mean to tournament fighting
movies specifically. These were
qualities that are a necessity to tournament movies that might not be as much
of a necessity to other movies. They
were the things that help make tournament movies stand out above the pack of
other tournament movies that get released.
Fighting games are one of the tougher kind of games to
translate to the big screen, I’d say.
They are played for the fighting, not for the story. The desire for dead characters to be playable
in future installments (Sub-Zero in the Mortal
Kombat franchise) causes the stories to get convoluted (Noob Saibot and
Sub-Zero II). But that hasn’t stopped
the adaptations from coming. There is
currently a Mortal Kombat webseries
happening. How good a film adaptation is
depends upon the people behind it and how they choose the tackle the idea. So far, there have been few good adaptations
of tournament style fighting games to film.
Will that change in the future?
Only time will tell. Hopefully
Hollywood gets their act together and figures out how to consistently make good
adaptations of tournament fighting games.
And after that conclusion, let’s stick the ending with some
notes:
- Mortal Kombat was directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, the director of the first Death Race film.
- Robin Shou starred as Liu Kang in the Mortal Kombat movies. He was in all three Death Race movies.
- Talisa Soto was in both Mortal Kombat movies as Kitana. She was in Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, with Ray Park, who was in Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.
- Frank Welker and Linden Ashby were in the first Mortal Kombat movie. Both men were featured in the Anaconda franchise. Welker had a role in the first, and Ashby had a role in the third.
- Richard Branden made an appearance in Mortal Kombat. Another movie he was in was Warriors of Virtue.
- Then there is Gregory McKinney, who was in Mortal Kombat and Money Train.
- Lance LeGault was in Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. He was also in the first Iron Eagle movie.
- Finally, we have Dennis Keiffer, an actor who was in Batman & Robin and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, a movie I have linked to each week since I wrote about it.
- What do you think of movies based on tournament fighting games, or based on video games in general? What do you think about the Mortal Kombat movies? How about the new show? You can discuss anything from this post in the comments.
- Also in the comments, you can leave any suggestions of movies for me to watch in future installments of the Sunday “Bad” Movies. If not there, why not try my Twitter or my email at sundaybadmovies@gmail.com?
- Next week’s movie is Sextette, a movie I’ve seen the trailer for and thought was completely insane. It’ll be interesting to see what it’s like. And next week, you’ll know what I think of it. See you then.
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