Wednesday 9 June 2010

Mortal Kombat reboot pitch is gritty, also shitty

Yes, I've seen this. You can stop asking now, alright?

This has been all the rage this week, mostly thanks to it showing up without any indication as to what it was "selling." Now we know: It's a "professional fan-film" made by a guy trying to sell a "reboot" pitch to the rights holders. With professional-looking shorts getting easier to produce, we'll probably end up seeing a lot more of these for "genre" franchises.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_MqZn7E-mk

Honestly... I think it looks like crap. Not that the other "Kombat" movies were any great shakes, and the guy certainly has the technical chops for spot-on recreating the Saw/Hostel "house style" to saying nothing of the ability to aquire the aid of Jeri Ryan and Michael Jai White.

But the "angle" he's pitching, a "realistic" gritty revamp of the series with the various supernatural Kombatants reworked as psychos with skin conditions or body-mod fetishes? BLEGH. No, thank you.

Y'know... we're coming up on the 35th Anniversary of "Jaws" next week. Whole books have been written making the case that, even though they stand up as great films in their own right, "Jaws" and "Star Wars" ultimately had a negative impact on moviemaking by creating the blockbuster mentality. I dunno how much truth there's ever been in that thesis, but I'm starting to feel like one day I'll be feeling something similar about Christopher Nolan's "Batman" movies... loving them as films but HATING the impact they're having on genre film, i.e. making this kind of grim-and-gritty, "realistic," suck-the-weird-out-of-everything reimagining the order of the day.

To hell with "grounded," and fuck "realism." I can't wait to see the "realistic" version of Superman, where instead of Krypton he's from Canada or something, and instead of flying he's just a pretty good helicopter pilot.

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