MORTAL KOMBAT: REBIRTH and LEGACY: (Almost) Flawless Victory

Mortal Kombat: Legacy (2011) – Directed by Ken Tancharoen – Starring Michael Jai White, Jeri Ryan, Lateef Crowder, Darren Shahlavi, Tahmoh Penikett, Matt Mullins, Sam Tjhia, Jolene Tran, Ryan Robbins, Ian Anthony Dale, Kevan Ohtsji, Shane Warren Jones, Peter Shinkoda, Kirby Morrow, Erica Cerra, and Tracy Spiridakos.

Conceived by Ken Tancharoen, MORTAL KOMBAT: REBIRTH is an 8-minute short produced in the hopes of getting Warner Brothers to greenlight a new MORTAL KOMBAT movie. Instead of a movie, Time Warner approved a new web series, MORTAL KOMBAT: LEGACY, a series of nine webisodes telling six stand-alone stories.

It’s phenomenal.

I’m glad I didn’t get around to watching either the movie or the series until now, because the second season of LEGACY will air in a few months and a feature film is reportedly in the offing for sometime in this calendar year, too. I can’t wait.

REBIRTH takes the MORTAL KOMBAT franchise and grounds it as a gritty, realistic (more or less), contemporary drama. Jackson Briggs (Michael Jai White) and Sonya Blade (Jeri Ryan) work in the Deacon City Police Department. The world of Deacon City is not-quite-apocalyptic but things are bad. There are killers running around by the names of Baraka (Lateef Crowder) and Reptile (Richard Dorton), physical oddities who are monstrous in deed as well as appearance.ni

I love the storytelling technique in REBIRTH. The entire 8 minutes promo is controlled by Jacks (not Jax, apparently). Sitting in an interrogation room, he lays out the status quo to a prisoner who’s face is kept in shadow the entire time. Jacks tells this shadowed figure about Reptile and Baraka, the latter responsible for the death of Johnny Cage (Matt Mullins), an ex-actor who’s been working undercover for the cops after his career went in the toilet.

I love this reinterpretation of the franchise, but Tancharoen went a bit too far with the gore and grotesque for my personal tastes. I will say, however, that even though I didn’t need to see Reptile munching on the flesh of decapitated heads he keeps in his refrigerator, it’s useful to clearly mark REBIRTH as something new. The video games are rather violent, of course, and this mini-film isn’t shying away that violence.

After Sonya joins Jacks in the interrogation room, the identity of their captive is revealed: Scorpion (Ian Anthony Dale). Jacks and Sonya want to release Scorpion so he can join some bad-ass martial arts tournament featuring the baddest of the bad. Given that he used to be the best assassin, they figure simply releasing him will get him an invite. Befitting the violent tone of the film, Jacks and Sonya want him to kill everyone at the tournament. They believe killing all of the Reptiles and Barakas is the only way to save the city.

The success of REBIRTH led to the creation of LEGACY, which is even better. There’s a few continuity changes – Johnny Cage isn’t dead and the supernatural element has been folded back in, and they are both positive changes. There are six stories told over the nine episodes and they’re all largely stand-alone. LEGACY doesn’t tell a story as much as it sets up a future story. In effect, it’s just REBIRTH done longer and better.

This isn’t a huge complaint because most of the stories work wonderfully and you can understand why a Michael Jai White or Jeri Ryan wouldn’t want to stick around for 9 webisodes, and that the studio might not want to pay them to stick around, either. Not knowing this, it was a bit disappointing to see them dominate the first and second episodes and then vanish from the narrative. I was also a bit disappointed that each episode reset itself – meaning that after every short film, I had to sit through a credit sequence and then a new introductory sequence that – if it were a part 2two – recapped what I had just seen.

This is a huge pet peeve of mine, and I fully admit that this is a #firstworldproblem. But when I’m watching a series on Netflix, why do I have to watch the same intro and credit sequences over and over again? There should be a “skip intro” button.

So, I was annoyed, but that’s because I didn’t understand we were getting nine shorts instead of a full film.

My favorite of the nine episodes was the Scorpion and Sub-Zero entry, which takes the time to establish Hanzo Hasashi as a good father and husband before he becomes the assassin Scorpion, but the Raiden entry is equally strong. In that single-episode story, Raiden (Ryan Robbins) is teleported into an insane asylum and captured. He spends the rest of the episode dealing with a disbelieving, lobotomy happy staff. He convinces a fellow patient (played by Revolution’s Tracy Spiridakos) to kill him, which allows him to reappear in a new location. Raiden’s story is the most tightly told, and really crackles (heh) with a narrative intensity at seeing the god of thunder locked away in an insane asylum and at the mercy of merciless doctors.

It’s rare that I make recommendations for readers to go out and buy or watch a movie, but if you like action movies or MORTAL KOMBAT, I definitely recommend picking LEGACY out of the bargain bin and giving it a watch. Much like the Thomas Jane-starring Punisher “fan movie” released earlier this year was the best Punisher film we’ve seen, LEGACY is far and away the best MORTAL KOMBAT film and an excellent web series compared to anything else, too.

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And if you like good sci-fi action stories with strong female leads, please check out my 2011 novel,HARPSICHORD AND THE WORMHOLE WITCHES.

Harpsichord & the Wormhole Witches. The First Novel of the Deep. Now Available at Amazon.com in Paperback. From Atomic Anxiety Press.

REVOLUTION: First Thoughts on NBC’s Dumb Dumb Show

Revolution (2012) – Episodes 1-5 – Starring Billy Burke, Tracy Spiridakos, Giancarlo Esposito, Zak Orth, David Lyons, Anna Lise Phillips, Graham Rogers, J. D. Pardo, Tim Guinee, Daniella Alonso, and Elizabeth Mitchell.

First off, this isn’t the first review of REVOLUTION that’s been posted to Atomic Anxiety. A couple weeks ago, Eric Woodard was nice enough to let me post his thoughts on the show. If you haven’t given that review a read, I suggest you go take a look. Eric administers a scientific beatdown on the show, so I’ve decided to take a look at all the non-science stuff. The basic approach to this review is to ignore the science and just look at the narrative and see if it makes a difference.

It really doesn’t.

Forget the science, REVOLUTION is a show full of dumb people and that’s an unforgivable mistake. If the show wants to play loose with physics and the natural laws of the universe, I can look past that if the actual story was good (if you can get past rubber suited monsters, you can get past pretty much anything), but REVOLUTION does not tell a good story.

Or, rather, it does tell a good story, it just tells it with so many stupid characters, and tells it in such a clumsy manner that it’s like watching the world’s longest train crash.

Now, you may be wondering how I managed to make it through the first five episodes if I’m clearly not a fan of the show. Fair question. I keep watching because the story is intriguing. There are glimpses here of a show I could get into, and seemingly every episode has a scene or two where REVOLUTION starts gaining some traction before the wheels slip and the show slides back into Dummyville. I like this idea of a post-apocalyptic America where nature is reclaiming the world, and mini kingdoms have sprouted up. I like the idea of a ragtag group trying to fight back. I like that characters die. And I really like Giancarlo Esposito.

The biggest problem with the show, however, is it’s primary protagonist, Charlie Matheson (Tracy Spiridakos). Now, I don’t mean to disparage Ms. Spiridakos’ acting ability; she’s not great but she’s certainly qualified to make this show work if she had a character to work with, but she doesn’t. Charlie is one of the most annoying lead characters I’ve experienced on TV. She’s so bad it’s like she’s wandered in from a CBS sitcom. Or New Girl. All she does is whine and b*tch and moan and make weepy eyes and toss around moral judgments.

I know people have called her out for being a Katniss knock-off, but the problem isn’t that she’s a young woman with a bow and arrow in a post-apocalyptic setting and that somehow makes all of REVOLUTION come off as NBC making a cash grab for some of the Hunger Games money. No, the problem is that she makes everyone else around her stupid.

REVOLUTION is just chock full of dumb people. Captain Tom Neville (Esposito) isn’t dumb, but the people that surround Charlie are all made dumber by her mere presence. Why a group of adults continually lets itself get jerked around by a kid is beyond me. Miles (Billy Burke) is this bad-ass killer who used to be in the militia – heck, he used to run the militia – but he’s turned his back on that crowd and was living/running a bar in Chicago. And then this damn kid Charlie walks into his life, tells him her father (and his brother) are dead and the bad guys have captured her brother and Miles has to play reluctant rebel.

But he’s a killer. He’s a bad-ass. People fear him for what he did setting up and training Monroe’s goons …

And he lets this kid stop him from killing a bounty hunter just because she doesn’t yet know the world is a big bad scary place.

This is the same world, I remind you, that just came to her doorstep and killed her dad and kidnapped her brother. Yeah, that world is the one that Charlie doesn’t want her uncle – the guy her dad told her to go find – to hurt it.

Time and again, Charlie is here to keep REVOLUTION from being a show for adults. The YA-ness of Charlie is something the writers don’t know how to handle and so what we get is a bunch of adults acting stupid to bow to her whims. If REVOLUTION was properly set up as a battle between Miles on one side and Neville on the other, we’d have something here worth watching, I think. Burke doesn’t give the performance Esposito does, but Esposito isn’t weighed down by having to deal with Charlie.

The difference between the two characters demonstrates how REVOLUTION gets it half-right. Neville has Charlie’s brother Danny (Graham Rogers) as his prisoner, but it’s Danny who has to change to keep up with Neville, while on the other side it’s Miles who has to change to Charlie’s way of thinking. It’s maddening.

REVOLUTION is also incredibly repetitive. Issues that are seemingly resolved one episode are back the next, whether it’s Charlie’s morality or Miles threatening to quit. I mean, honestly, REVOLUTION is the kind of nonsense where we have to sit through Miles telling everyone he’s going to leave because … wait for it … it’s safer for everyone else if he goes away, when we all know he’s going to stick around. Maddening. I think we get the exact same scene between Monroe (David Lyons) and Charlie’s mom (Elizabeth Mitchell) 18 times in 5 episodes where he comes into the luxurious room he’s keeping her prisoner in, threatens her, and she looks sad and says no.

Ugh.

And why is everyone living in building that were built in the 19th century?

REVOLUTION is the kind of insipidness where you know which character Miles has come to save simply by finding the most attractive person among the prisoners. Wait, what? You mean he’s here to save the hot woman who looks like she showered two seconds ago instead of the ragged dude next to her? Seriously? I never saw that coming. Never. It’s also the kind of show that completely wastes its guest stars. C. Thomas Howell shows up just to get killed. Jeff Fahey shows up just to act a little weird than stab one of the regulars.

Like Lost, REVOLUTION spends some time doing the flashback thing, and while that got a bit annoying early on, by the fifth episode it … yeah, it’s still annoying. They don’t overdo it but I do think the show’s creators think it’s more clever than it actually is. We can figure out that the Militia guy who’s following them is Neville’s son long before the big reveal. When a show gives you that, “A-ha! Aren’t we clever?!?!” moment and you’re all, “Figured it out 45 minutes ago,” then the show has issues.

For now, REVOLUTION stays in the Hulu queue, if for no other reason than I can look up from whatever else I’m doing when Esposito is on the screen. I do give the show credit for moving forward, though, so I’m hopeful that Charlie is grown up after the botched rescue on her brother. She acts all tough and forward-looking at the end of the fifth episode, but whether this is a new shift or just something the next episode is going to ignore remains to be seen. At some point, however, REVOLUTION needs to decide exactly what it is and run with it. I think one of the things that sunk Terra Nova last year was that the show seemed to clearly want to be a cop show sent in Dinosaur Town, yet the producers kept forcing Jurassic Family Robinson on us.

It’s also not a good idea to have your main character be the most annoying character on the show.

Just tossing that out there.