Sensory input does not perception and awareness make though. Though if you mistake a flower for a dog that is probably a sign of defect. And I am not stating that postmodern analysis is the only valid, all encompassing method to pick apart anything.

Why is it so hard for people to understand that you can move away from the source material. What really is going down here is nothing short of crying heresy because deviation somehow personally offends them, or threatens their MK security blanket they wrap around themselves.

I am beginning to think that being die hard fans is akin to mental disease. If so, then thank you, I will not constitute a part of it any further.

You know, if they just stop calling it Mortal Kombat, every one wins. You get your movie, and I get my MK adaptation in hopefully 3-6 years. I just don't understand why my desire to properly represent the canon is insane but your unwillingness to relinquish the MK product name is not.

No no no...

Well here,

Personally, it's not about moving away from the source material. I could accept loosing alot of the the canon for the sake of following one fruitful thread line. That's with the understanding that alot of compensating would have to happen to make the thing a good story in MK's case.

It's about consistency between all the material that's there. It's about maintaining the character descriptions according to what's in the games. It's about retaining the characters motivation and personification. It's about accurately depicting the appeal to the series no matter what the medium. That shouldn't change... and I don't see a good reason to deviate from that considering how "die-hard" some of us are.

There are alot of ways to do that without running away from the core concept of a thing. I mean, it's like asking one question: Do you want a fluke fandom with mediocre reviews or, do want the same sort of fandom to spawn from the films as you have from the games?

MK could be modernized in similar ways as the Justice League was for Teen Titans. In that case a subject like Batman didn't loose his theme or appeal in the process.. and there were essentially two of them there. The old original guy, and the "hip, new, spunky" kid that were both instantly recognizable as Batman and Bruce.

So then.. in Rebirth...
Who was that guy with the dreadlocks?
Who was that guy with the funky skin complex?
Why are Jax and Sonya police officers?
and What the hell is Scorpion doing in handcuffs?

lol

Stay as close as possible to the canon please. If not the story lines, then at least get the characters right.

I just wanted to stop by and leave my opinion on this. This is great great news. I remember listening to an interview at the end of Luke's (Total MK) video regarding MK Rebirth. The man that played jax also said they were doing a big movie at the end of the 10 web episodes.

The problem lies within that we both consider differently the constituent of MK. You need Reptile to be humanoid reptile, I define Reptile as his role. To me the change in the roots do not exactly matter as I get the same thing basically. So far. He is still a psychopathic (considering his character portrayal in MK4 where he is responsible for genocide, his devolving intellect, plus MK:SM) flesh eating monster (no disrespect for the two surviving Harlequin Ichtyosys sufferers I know).

Yesternight I had a fairly meaningful exchange with DAb, Mick and the other lovable goons on IRC about how this is an Elseworld. If the Batman of Superman: Red Son is not Bruce Wayne and is a reckless terrorist is still recognizable as Batman ... as in the role, then I have no qualms about this mixing up things for a different intepretation.

And to be honest, I have seen the same basic deal without change go down for 9 games, and one fairly good and one horrible movie adaptation, the second being halfway true to the visuals of the game. No thanks.

I do not care about superficial brand naming, some contrived canon retc. as long as the result has IMO artistic or entertainment merit. And that Rebirth has. I will not deny myself entertainment on the ground that it does not adhere to something that is a second layered conception of something and its way of how it should be ... aka, the fandoms conception.

First and foremost, I can't believe this thread is still going on!

@Chrome: You accuse the "die-hard fans" of having mental "disease" (which it is not called that BTW) yet you write, on a forum, in such a vernacular prose that isn't for a forum but an SAT essay! This isn't Philosophy class and I don't know who you're trying to impress but don't get me wrong, using such vocabulary and sentence structure, on a forum, are often signs of someone with extreme social insecurities, which also means mental illness... I sure hope you do not talk the way you write!

What you are calling "art" and "entertainment" I call "copying from existing sources." By adapting anything MK into a torture-porn crime drama is basically remaking the SAW films as well as the other morbid horror films available today.

There's a reason I said: Keep MK MK and CSI CSI - they're two different entities that encompass totally different elements. Keeping faithful to the original concepts (not the terminology you used, which made you look more like a baffling buffoon whose copying words from a dictionary and using them in improper places) by assuming what makes Reptile Reptile is his anti-social psychopathology (you dropped the ball on that phrase eh?). Mortal Kombat wasn't a psychological study (except by psychologists looking to make a quick buck) it is was a well-written video game storyline that featured digitalized fighters with over-the-top gore and fatalities. Reptile also wasn't human - he was a Raptor who turned into a chameleon.

Personally, if WB wants to make this type of Mortal Kombat, so be it, but I hope they also consider something that sticks to the source. Mortal Kombat lost a lot of fans since Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance for good reason - it looked like Tekken with violence. Hell, even the new Tekken movie had more violence than MK (and I think it was better), which proves you can stick to the canon and deliver the violence that came with the games.

People rant about how new film adaptations straying from the canon are often better than the canons but they fail to mention any titles. Here are a couple where new reimaging sucked and another couple where staying to the original sources (though with minor changes) helped:

Re-imaged films that sucked:
- Scrooged, a modern take on A Christmas Carol. It's a funny movie but wasn't very popular.
- A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) - Seriously, how does a film like this (was actually was based on the original ideas the 80s film wanted to do but couldn't) do better in the foreign market than the American? Hmm... maybe because the foreign markets weren't quick enough to have the original? And censorship in the UK probably didn't help much matters.
- Romeo and Juliet - Starring DiCaprio and Winslett. Seriously, gangsters? Who talks the way people do in modern society anyway?
- 10 Things I Hate About You - Another Shakespeare remake set in modern times.
- Super Mario Bros - Seriously, what the hell were they thinking AND smoking? And they want to do the same thing to MK?
- Every horror film remake for that matter, since they often lacked the psychological elements that made the originals popular (TCM anyone?).

Re-imagined films that rocked:
- Alice in Wonderland (2010) - OK, so it was a combo of the first two books with a few additions, but hell with a box office record like that who'd want to argue?
- Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory - I'm talking the Gene Wilder version, before the travesty that was the Johnny Depp's version. What's even awesome about this is the fact it was made decades BEFORE the remake/reimagining era.

As you can see, the list is small for the ones that rocked and is mostly based from Box Office reports. A lot of fanatics may suffer from mental illness but a lot of us do not. Believe it or not some of us have college degrees from established schools and some of us (like me) started college at 16.

How do you like them apples?

Three things:

-check the little flag next to the databox on the left. That is also my mother tounge which shares no ethnolinguistical similarity to ANY language presently known. The way I talk is probably well-known around here.

-while visually it shares the sterile enviroment of the "realistic" and "gritty" kind of remakes (Batman Begins) and the sterility and saturation of the SAW I fail to see how this is torture porn. People are killed. That is not torture. It does have a crime undercurrent though. I fail to see how visceral torture scenes and emotional guilt-trips that make up SAW are in any way related to Mortal Kombat.

-Bc. and currently Mgr. of English.

Also, considering how much time I have spent here and around MK previously in my teens, I am not reluctant to call the fanbase mentally ill. They sure act like it overall. All of us included.

And canon doesn't mean textual corpus of the original a.k.a. the original script, idea and text. It means the most reduced core concept, which in this case is martial arts competition held with contestants willing to kill...for example. That Sub-Zero spouts ice in what way, or that Reptile is human or creature is not really a point if it fulfills the same function in plot.

Some good remakes in my opinion. That was a pretty inspiring list there, but I wouldn't call Depp's ChocoFactory an utter ruin. THe kid was more convincing that the holier than thou in the first one (compared to normal folks, he still looks angelic). And both took some liberties from Roald Dahl's original story.

12 Monkeys -remake of La Jetee
Carpenter's The Thing -remake of The Thing from Another World.
The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009) -remake of the original with Walter Matthau
Heat - remake of the 1989 L. A. Takedown

criticizing Chrome for being intelligent doesn't really help you're argument. For a film to be "torture porn" there actually has to be torture involved.

Adaptations that heavily deviate from their source material that rocked:

The Fly
Nolan's Batman
Burton's Batman
High Plains Drifter
3:10 to Yuma
The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
Fight Club
The Magnificent Seven

He and everyone else has full access to question my intelligence. And I would like to point out that I am not counterarguing that their viewpoint is invalid, I am counterarguing that my viewpoint can be also valid.

Burtons Batman is possibly even more close to the original material than the Dark Knight is.....

With batman nonchalantly killing off people. Guess what did he do in his earliest appearences.... Case of the Chemical Syndicate for example....

I'm sorry, but how no one understands that sociopathic killings do not constitute "torture porn," especially when people are often first scared (a form of torture, though intellectual) before the sociopath kills them, by the sociopath, is way beyond me. I think you both have miserably failed to understand my arguments and you're both well-versed in rhetoric, which as you should have learned in college, accomplishes nothing in the real world but a waste of time.

I'm not quite certain what being from Italy has to do with one's intelligence? I say congratulations to you, from what I hear Italy is a beautiful country and honored for its architecture.

Frankly, I will not speak to either of you of this again.

In this case Reptile in MKR could be defined as an alternate interpretation of the regular Reptile since almost all of his qualities form original universe present in MKR. No just merely functions.
To put it in a more comfortable way:
MK Rep - vicious, cannibal, serves Shang Tsung, humanoid lizard.
MKR Rep - vicious, cannibal, serves Shang Tsung, lizard-like human.
MKR Reptile doesn't have only one thing that original Reptile has - being lizard.
Everything else is basically the same. So this character basically has all Reptile qualities, save one, that was changed for the sake of fitting new interpretation of the MK universe. In the end MKR Reptile is still Reptile.


It's funny, but personalities in MKR were on the spot (as far as one could judge from 10 minute clip). All that was changed is enivironment. But some people prefer to overlook it.


It is exactly the same thought that I have after witnessing several different fandoms.


It doesn't mean that you can't have college degree with a menatl illness. Just saying.
As for your post - it was laughable really. Insulting human for him being well-spoken? Geez...How much cheaper can you get?


As it was already stated several times - MKR kept original concepts, but it reshaped them to fit a new environment. People just need to be more open minded to see beyond borders of the beloved canon.


Could I ask, what on Earth gave you an idea that MKR will be psychologcal study? The only logical answer I see - your huge (zealous) imagination.


MK lost fans because some of them were like you - they just couldn't accept changes.

Actually Romeo + Juliet were succesfull in the box office, so not everyone though that it sucked.

Fans lost because of Deadly Alliance were not missed and I'm mad some of them have come back. That shit separated the wheat from the chaff. The boards have been VERY noticeably worse for the past seven months than they were for the past five years.

Fans lost because of Deadly Alliance were not missed and I'm mad some of them have come back.

You do understand some of the fans that left or were inactive after DA were also staff members of this site, right? I know one specifically who went under the radar and a lot of people did because MK pretty much became a stylized violent version of Tekken.

I think my opinions on this remake have been taken completely out of context and I'll explain below.

This greatly needs pointed out regarding the Rebirth trailer:

What Stayed the Same:

- Storylines for Jax, Sonya, and Cage were slightly altered. Somehow Jax became in charge of Sonya and Cage, which was unusal.

- There will be a tournament. Missing of course is the "ten win" rule and the location of the tournament is not known.

What Completely Changed:

- The movie is based on realism and completely re-images MK as creepy and uninviting. The film feels like SAW and Thirteen Ghosts (which liked better than the SAW series). It seems to take place solely on Earth with no mention of Outworld.

- The environment wreaks of film noir. So it seems they have to go through a tournament to uphold the law? Sounds like another Van Damme or Tapout straight-to-video independent film.

- Who could forget Ed Boon's mention that this remake crossed over the line for remakes when he first learned about it. Then, all of a sudden (probably after he learned he was getting paid for it) he supports it as an alternative MK universe?

- Jax is communicating with Scorpion, and Scorpion can actually hold a conversation as a human?

- Shang Tsung comes off as a mob boss, which would make sense for a crime-drama, since the most of them utilize the Mafia as villains (Batman, The Shadow, etc).

- Baraka as a surgeon gone serial killer. In the games, Baraka was a race of Nomad/Barakas. Therefore he wasn't considered mutated but of his race. This version of Baraka definitely needs more development before I can feel comfortable with this plot - why does he decide to go off the deep end is an important question that needs to be answered.

- Reptile as a human with a disease. Really? The cretin that takes the form of a human is now a human with a rare disease? That also just so happens to eat heads like they were cakes? Seriously, that says it all.

- Scorpion is actually alive. So if this is supposed to be made of realism, how the hell does a human have white eyes and still be able to see? Often the eyes are dead in this case and they are blind. Sadly, I once seen a kid with a white, dead eye in passing, so I do know it's possible, but doubtful he can see.

Unfortunately this project is too preliminary to tell how it will result and it appears there may be different characters than originally appeared in the first pitch. It does have the potential to be interesting if they add character development and more story leading up to the tournament as well as equally devoting time to the tournament. If they keep the subtitle Rebirth, I am 100% OK with this project, but if they call it MK, then I am not.

And?

Good riddance?

Look you guys can cry about this till the cows come home but this 10 min video sparked more interest in Mortal Kombat then any game has in the last 10 years.

It got over a million hits on Youtube. MKD and Armageddon sold over a million copies. MKvsDCU sold over 2 million and Deadly Alliance broke 3. And it's much easier to watch a video than buy a $50 game. Especially multiple times.

So I'd argue it comes to about the same, really.

Besides, the first RE movie was a box office success, and lots of people still say they liked it while lots of people in the fanbase also hate it for being so different from the games. I've been saying all along this is exactly the same thing as that. The only difference between this and doing Super Mario Bros. as cyberpunk about evolved dinosaurs, is it's better made. Just because you like a movie doesn't mean it's good as an adaptation.

A few pages back, but... let's see. The first Mortal Kombat game revolved around a tournament hosted by Shang Tsung involving a number of fighters of debatable sanity, competing in what could be a bloody fight to the death to achieve their ends.
This series seems to also feature a tournament hosted by Shang Tsung involving a bunch of crazies fighting it out to attain their ends. Scorpion may not have been depicted wearing his iconic outfit in the trailer, but he utilized a similar weapon and is entering the tournament to hunt down Sub-Zero. Just like he had done in the game canon. Reptile isn't a literal reptile, but he seems to be an enforcer for Tsung, and has the tendency to devour people - much as he's known to do in the games. Baraka is fairly divergent, story-wise, but in the games, he's little more than a mindless thug who leads a group of mindless thugs, so it's fine to me that they gave him a different backstory because he will fundamentally be the same blade-wielding killer fighting on behalf of the bad guys.

If I recall, the man heading the Rebirth/Reborn/whatever series did imply that there would be some mysticism involved in the story, which may tie it more closely to the source material. But, to me, I don't see how this project lacks the core of Mortal Kombat. It has the violence and gore, the tournament, recognizable characters... it's just a different setting.

Eh, Sociopaths generally aren't murderous bastards, that is due to psychosis, hence psychopath. Sociopaths are only incapable to attuning to society's demands (socio) and are generally lacking in empathic intelligence. A psychopath has no empathy towards whatsoever (not meaning that he cannot understand or evend educe emotional states of others). Etc...

And the fact that most sociopaths are not killers and a good deal of them are actually functioning people. And I wouldn't call simple fright torture. Scaring people is not intellectual torture.



Allow me:

I would argue that thinking Mortal Kombat is just a tournament and a lot of gore is the exact mistake Tancharoen himself made.

MK Is more about Asian stuff and tributing kung fu cinema from the 70's and 80's than it's about fatalities. There's a reason everyone and everything on Shang's Island and in Outworld looks Japanese. MKR fails for the same reason MK3 is the black sheep of the franchise: it's the only one set in an urban American environment.

Now, if the trailer pulled a swerve on us and that's the last we see of this Deacon City shit and the rest of the webisodes take place on an Asian island with gongs and buddha statues and pagodas and shit...or hell if the whole thing is at least set in a Chinatown section of this stupid Deacon City place, THAT is when it will be Mortal Kombat.
Tancharoen even fucking said he leans away from "Asian mysticism" and more towards a generic "demonic" evil feel. (which makes me suspicious that in his version, all the badguys are possessed by evil spirits and his MK is just fucking The Exorcist + the basement brawls from Fight Club)

However neither did the Midway team, or the directors of the movie used the asian theme to anything else other than...theme, setting. background. It really has no effect on anything, not the characters, not the events....

Why? Liu Kang has little in common with the shaolin (even if these shaolin are different, but straying from religious or philosophical concepts is tacky at best), Kahn and Shang have nothing in common with chinese or japanese elements (MK1 Shang was clearly japanese dressed with a chinese name).
Story short: Vogel did background research. Other than showing what these concepts were he just used them as justifications and background.

And as above, this is what alienated most people in MK3, and I would add MK4 (a design so loose and inadherent to anything) too. They aren't as good IMO because they deviated, however, they are bad because being singularly uniinspired. If MK3 had better designs visually (spandex, Disco Nightwolf, Vampira-Elvira Sindel, plumber Srtyker) it would have been better on the long run.

And I think this is why it might work in Rebirth's case, that the core concept of the story can be implemented elsewhere, elsewhen. My personal wish would be for MK to actually BE oriental, not just LOOK oriental. Let Kang have actual philosophical complexity aside being errand boy to the shaolin or White Lotus... let Raiden be actually a big part Japanese, even if he is the overall mythological equivalent of thunder and lightning.

And fix Scorpion's name from Hasashi to Hazashi.

Given that this is Hollywood we're talking about, chances are we can rely on Shang Tsung being based in Deacon City's version of Chinatown, if not the tournament itself.

By making MK realistic is what makes me lose the interest for the whole Rebirth project. I love the fantasy elements of the games and the storyline. There are so many "realistic" fighting games out there such as Tekken, Virtua Fighter, Street Fighter... Mortal Kombat has other worlds, magic, monstrous races... They aren't just humans gone mad! And I find it boring that they are making it so.

You people can argue all you want about what is MK and what is not MK. But honestly, MK: Rebirth does not feel like MK at all to me. And therefore I won't support it.

Oh, and for the record, Chrome... I am quite mentally healthy. Just thought I'd let you know. ;)
Are you?

Welp, it appears that going to college at the age of 16 doesn't account for much in terms of flag recognition. Also, Chrome: I thought the Hungarian language had a loose relationship to Finnish and Estonian?

After the first two MK movies, I welcome this "Rebirth" with open arms.

The Finn-Ugor Theory.

Currently there are large debates about this, as IMO it is an outdated theory that had political undertones of solidifying HUngarians as more akin to Europe than to Asia.

Our language actually bears more resemblance to Turkish languages, even before the Turk Occupation that lasted for 150 years (yeah, that much) and while we were a periferial part of the Ottoman Empire. However there is also an uncanny amount of slavic-baltic-finnish words, for example:



Actually, the Hungarian ethnogenesis itself is pretty muddy, but contemporary concensus seems to shift towards ural-turko-khazar influences during our migration from the Ural into the Carpathians.

The Italian flag actually honors ours. The unified Italy took it's colors from the unsuccessfull revolution of 1848-49 when we tried to split from the Habsburg Monarchy (though they transformed it into a dualist state).