Mortal Kombat in Home Video, the review
Mortal Kombat in Home Video
Mortal Kombat in Home Video is an essential purchase for fans of the brutal videogame franchise who can now enjoy the film again in high definition after the streaming release which also took place in Italy with cinemas still closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. As highlighted in our review at the time of the Italian release, Mortal Kombat is a film that is anything but perfect but funny, sometimes naive, and which consciously wants to have a 90s aftertaste that succeeds, even with some unsuccessful steps, to touch the right buttons to make the fans jump and above all to entertain the rest of the public.The positive thing is also that the film moves away from the typical formula of the cine-comic, reported with little happened recently in some video games, embracing instead the raw, urgent and caciarona of certain all-round action franchises focusing very well on world building. In this sense, Mortal Kombat worked very well as a "prologue" while having complete meaning and full autonomy. The hope is obviously, even in the face of good feedback on the HBO Max platform in the United States, that there is a sequel.
Mortal Kombat in Home Video, audio / video quality
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Italy kindly sent us a standard blu-ray version of Mortal Kombat. From both the video and audio point of view, there is an immediate leap in quality with some pleasant surprises, especially in the audio sector. But let's go in order with the video encoding which is now the standard one for all the most recent films which are then reproposed in blu-ray or 1080p HD 16 × 9 2.40: 1.The video flow is constant and offers excellent dynamism and overall homogeneity to the film also in correlation with the different locations and the different degrees of post-production intervention carried out on them and on the actors. Compression suffers a bit in some situations, especially on some background elements that are not always perfectly intelligible and clear, but on the other hand the details in the foreground are always clear even when the camera movements become more sudden, see in the many action sequences.
The excellent work on the lights and lighting in the processing phase (interesting the choice of setting the scenes on Earth or at night or shooting them with a palette and an ever-tending lighting towards dark tones making more homogeneous that of the locations that have then had a greater reworking in CGI) allows the video compression to work very well on the sharpness of the details, see the textures of the costumes, and on the depth making everything more compact from a visual point of view and also managing to amalgamate very well, albeit with the due exceptions, practical effects and CGI.
Very good audio coding. All the tracks present, including Italian, are mastered in Dolby Digital 5.1 accompanied by Dolby Atmos TrueHD in English only. The good mixing and balancing of the Italian track immediately stands out to the ear, which is compact and with an almost perfectly set master that actually forces you to lower the volume almost instantly due to presence and body. The dialogues are always well intelligible, the soundtrack is never intrusive and the effects are positioned effectively thanks to an excellent panning (take as an example the scenes in which Sub-Zero is the protagonist).
Comparing the English track Dolby Digital 5.1 and the Dolby Atmos TrueHD one, the only substantial differences that can be found are the dialogues slightly "ahead" of the music and effects and the latter slightly more full-bodied as general volume.
Mortal Kombat in Home Video, the extras
The Home Video version of Mortal Kombat has a total of approximately 70 minutes of extra content. The longest featurette (about 20 minutes) is From Game to Screen: The Making of Mortal Kombat. This is a mini-documentary in which director Simon McQuoid and screenwriter Greg Russo analyze at a wide range the influence of the original video game on pop culture and the idea behind this cinematic reboot. The most interesting part is undoubtedly that linked to the creation of the costumes.Interesting, and absolutely unusual, the short featurette (about 4 minutes) Into the Krypt: Easter Eggs of Mortal Kombat in which the director himself analyzes some easter eggs scattered in as many scenes. A fun game that we had also played after watching the film and to which we had even dedicated an article The best Mortal Kombat Easter Eggs.
The two most interesting featurettes are definitely Fight Koreography (about 9 minutes) and Anatomy of a Scene (about 12 minutes). The first analyzes the attention paid to the many action sequences of the film but also talks about fighting styles. Many of the actors chosen are in fact martial arts experts and fans of the video game which led them to thoroughly study the fighting styles to be able to implement them realistically on the screen with excellent results. A particular focus was then reserved to the great Joe Taslim and his Sub-Zero and to the scenes that saw him as protagonist both the opening one and those with Jax and Scorpion.
In the second, instead, the director Simon McQuoid dwells on some scenes giving us some interesting background. From the use of practical effects (the creation of a machine to shoot ice and "malleable" ice for the scenes with Sub-Zero) to the choice of some particular locations in which to shoot, thus limiting the use of the green screen to a minimum. the interaction with the actors often leaving carte blanche, see the opening sequence in which Hiroyuki Sanada and Joe Taslim have modified many parts to their liking.
Complete the section of the extras Mortal Kombat : Fan Favorite Characters or 11 short featurettes that present the characters of the film (17 minutes total) and the Deleted Scenes, 4 in total, for just over 4 total minutes.
