My wife and I had the miraculous opportunity to sneak out and have a date night recently. It was the first time in over a year the stars aligned:

• all of our kids were asleep early(ish)
• we had sufficient energy 
• movie theaters were partially open
• we were both officially vaxxed

So, we went the SUPER romantic route and got front row tickets to, you guessed it, the Mortal Kombat reboot because nothing says “I love you” like unnecessarily bloody death tournaments based on video games from the early 90s.

As many of you know, I’m a big fan of fantasy, and the sub-genre of video games as stories is a growing market for writers in today’s game-centered culture. While not a gamer myself, I’m enamored by the epic tales that animate plots through the fingertips of the audience, tapping, and pressing their way through peril, danger, and adventure. With graphics being far more than the 16-bit Sage that I played my stories on as a kid, I can respect the appeal.

When Mortal Kombat hit the Blockbuster rentable games rack, it was almost always “taken.” It was an enigma because, unlike other games where stories and lore abounded, Mortal Kombat existed for pure bloodlust. We decapitated each other while contemplating where these fighters had come from and why they were so bent on destroying one another so violently.

When we played the games, we may have known all of the cheat codes, but we had little or no idea about the story unless we nerded out hardcore and researched them on the slow-mo internet land-lines (when no one in the house was using the phone, of course!) 

Then, like Street Fighter before it, Hollywood discovered they had an audience in their adolescent gamers. Thus, a movie was created to satiate our adolescent imaginations.

We bought tickets. We watched the movie. And we didn’t care that it sucked, we simply wanted to see how the violent story would play out. We looked for consistencies, trademark moves, phrases, and  we were satisfied to a certain extent– but even after the movie and the sequels to the games, we still sat in our beanbags, controllers in hand and pondered why?

• Why does Scorpion hate Subzero?
• Why does Goro and other characters look so “other-wordly?”
• Why does the Mortal Kombat tournament even exist?

The Mortal Kombat reboot answered these questions, and for loyal MK gamers it will be a delightful 1 hour and 50 minutes of nostalgia. 

But, if you are like me, your time will be better off playing the latest Final Fantasy, the Witcher, heck even Angry Birds has a better plot. 

In the end, this movie will forever be etched in my mind as the first movie that my wife and I saw after being in quarantine for over a year. Strangely enough, Mortal Kombat the video game will forever be etched in my mind as the first game that my best friend and I played that had an MA rating. 

And that little platform of nostalgia is about as high as the MK Universe will teeter in the story of my life; just below Mario Kart, Rampage, and Pong.