Poll of the Day > Mortal Kombat!

(+) Yeah! (+)

Zeus posted...

Even excluding SF (which was good because of camp, so I'm fine with overlooking it...

SF was an absolutely terrible movie. NO ONE liked it because it was good. We liked it because it was bad, and we enjoyed pointing at it and laughing.

That's not really an indicator of quality, and definitely not what we're talking about here.



Zeus posted...

I always enjoyed the Double Dragon movie even though it was pretty bad)

If you hadn't included the "even though it was pretty bad" part, I'd have said this statement alone invalidated every opinion you've ever had about movies ever.

Though you did include it, so I'd say that just shuffles that right into the same category of "I like this because it is bad".



Zeus posted...

It really wasn't, or at least not on its own merits. And I'm trying to think of one MK fan I knew who wasn't let down by it. I didn't think it terrible at the time, but it was massively disappointing on almost every level.

Speaking as someone who was in college when it came out, I never met a single person who had anything bad to say about it. Almost everyone who went to see it in theaters either loved it, or qualified their praise as "It was the best video game movie anyone's managed to make so far" (and honestly, there haven't been all that many made since that come close either). And a LOT of those people (probably most of them) were MK fans (I may have spent more time playing MK Trilogy in college than I did going to class). I think the most negative thing I ever heard was a few people asking why the Japanese god of thunder was played by a weird French dude.

In fact, this topic may literally be the first time in my entire life when I've ever heard someone really shitting on it at all.

It was popular enough at the time to make back its budget like seven times over. And the main theme song got airplay on the radio about a dozen times an hour, every hour, for around two months or so. There was a huge rush of positivity towards the franchise at the time, and a lot of that was spurred by the film.

Granted, I didn't hang around with the sort of sexless nerds who spent their entire weekly allowance dumping quarters into MK arcade machines or competing in MK tournaments like it was the sole important thing in their entire lives, so I probably wasn't getting the opinions of the hardest of the hardcore fans of the franchise. But let's be honest, those people were never going to like it regardless of how good or bad it was on its own merits (like comic fans who hate literally every comic movie ever made because they're not identical to the comics - "They gave Peter Parker organic web-shooters? WORST. MOVIE. EVAR.").

The real sad part is that people keep asking for video game movie adaptations, and they're almost always going to be terrible, because games keep getting bigger and more complex, game narratives keep getting more elaborate and harder to duplicate or distill into a single two-hour movie, and nerd expectations keep getting higher in general. MK hit at the right sweet spot in time and adapted a game that barely had any plot (since that was before Midway and NetherRealm overwrote the backstory into mass stupidity), so it could be translated into a movie and still mostly feel like the original game. We're probably never going to get that again (though the future for game adaptations might be jumping to streaming TV, where they can get more time to stretch plots out, so maybe they'll eventually figure out the winning formula).

On the other hand, I hear some people liked Sonic and Detective Pikachu, and both made more than enough money to be considered solid successes (and already have green-lit sequels), so maybe we've all just lowered our standards now and the Uncharted movie will win an Oscar or something.
---

ParanoidObsessive posted...

And the main theme song got airplay on the radio about a dozen times an hour, every hour, for around two months or so.

Lol I still hear it played at gyms all the time

---

Omg dat wall o txt lol

---

Sarcasthma posted...

I feel validated. :)

^_^

Also, how great was it when Scorpion took Jonny Cage to hell, and it switched to a metal soundtrack? The OG movie knew which notes to hit,

---

Oh dang. I loved the original movie. This makes me scared.

---

ParanoidObsessive posted...

SF was an absolutely terrible movie. NO ONE liked it because it was good. We liked it because it was bad, and we enjoyed pointing at it and laughing.

That's not really an indicator of quality, and definitely not what we're talking about here.

It was a fucking great comedy, what it wasn't was a faithful adaptation of the source material. And a lot of things we laughed at were meant to be humorous.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

If you hadn't included the "even though it was pretty bad" part, I'd have said this statement alone invalidated every opinion you've ever had about movies ever.

Though you did include it, so I'd say that just shuffles that right into the same category of "I like this because it is bad".

I wouldn't go that far. It's not the Mario Bros movie.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Speaking as someone who was in college when it came out, I never met a single person who had anything bad to say about it. Almost everyone who went to see it in theaters either loved it, or qualified their praise as "It was the best video game movie anyone's managed to make so far" (and honestly, there haven't been all that many made since that come close either). And a LOT of those people (probably most of them) were MK fans (I may have spent more time playing MK Trilogy in college than I did going to class).

I'm calling bullshit on that. I'm not sure I've ever run into anything that was universally praised, so unless you were sitting in a corner not talking to many people, you should have run into people who complained about it. And I have a hard time believing you'd run into many -- if any -- people who talked about it being the best movie based on a game at that point because that was barely a thing back then. And I'm going to knock the claim that few have come close since, because MK was the kind of video game movie that only worked as a video game movie and couldn't stand on its own legs as a film.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It was popular enough at the time to make back its budget like seven times over. And the main theme song got airplay on the radio about a dozen times an hour, every hour, for around two months or so. There was a huge rush of positivity towards the franchise at the time, and a lot of that was spurred by the film.

The movie was big because the games were big, not the other way around. And just because a lot of people went to see doesn't mean it was either good or well-liked, which is the problem with your weird obsession with box office numbers as a metric of popularity. Literally the only thing a box office will tell you is how many people saw something, and even then it's misleading because you'll get some people who see something multiple times.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The real sad part is that people keep asking for video game movie adaptations, and they're almost always going to be terrible, because games keep getting bigger and more complex, game narratives keep getting more elaborate and harder to duplicate or distill into a single two-hour movie, and nerd expectations keep getting higher in general.

But not really. There are still plenty of games with relatively simple stories that could be made into a movie. Most of the Uncharted games, for instance, play like movies... and given that so many games nowadays rely on actors for character likenesses and sometimes -- as was the case with Uncharted -- use motion capture, you're getting pretty damn close to a movie.
In fact, I'm always surprised we *haven't* seen any of them adapted until now.

Some other franchises it wouldn't really work for, like a good many RPGs. Otherwise the issue often isn't the complexity of the story, it's the people who work on the movie and the fact that they often only play lip service to the source material. It's basically Kevin Smith's Superman movie story every single fucking time.


---