Genre: Action/Supernatural
Premise: Based on one of the most famous video games in history, an aging amateur boxer is called upon to fight in an ancient tournament that takes place in multiple dimensions.
About: Greg Russo, who has upwards of TWELVE projects in development, will call Mortal Kombat his first official produced credit. When asked about which characters he was going to use, this is what he said: “Yeah. One of the trickiest things I think with adapting the properties are there are so many characters, right? I mean there are, I think there are 70 something characters in this and we don’t have the ability to stagger these films like the MCU does, right? We can’t do a Sonya movie and then do a Liu Kang movie. So we’re forced right into Avengers mode off the bat. When that happens from a story perspective, you’re naturally going to have to juggle a lot of different characters and you’ll realize very soon that you only have so much room in, what’s hopefully Story One. Our mantra as the team behind this movie is always kind of, Movie One first, you know, let’s just make that great. Let’s not think about anything else.”
Writer: Greg Russo
Details: November 2018 draft
I’m drawn to the ‘straight-up soulless assignment’ side of the business because there’s this irony in that, as an unknown writer, your sole objective is to write a script that gets you inside the golden Hollywood gates. Yet once inside, your focus is on winning jobs like Mortal Kombat.
I think the general population assumes that for a movie like Mortal Kombat, you scrape the bottom of the barrel and go with any writer who knows how to spell at a 4th grade level. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. A screenwriting job like Mortal Kombat is coveted by almost everyone in the business. Writers would die to get an assignment like this.
However, once they get the job, reality sets in. You have this concept that doesn’t really make sense. And that’s because the mythology wasn’t built to be some thoughtful movie narrative. It just needed to make enough sense for a video game. Which means your job is taking this thin nonsensical silly world and create a story that’s actually good out of it.
In South Philly, we meet 30-something boxer, Cole Morino. The cool thing about Cole is that his cornerman is the youngest in the business, his 12 year old daughter, Emily. Well, maybe she’s not officially his cornerman. But she’s spirited and a good motivator. If his wife, Allison, who he’s separated from, found out he was allowing Emily anywhere near one of his fights, he’d be dunzos. But they haven’t gotten caught so far.
After Allison picks Emily up, some dude in a blue outfit in a mask that I’m pretty sure has nothing to do with a pandemic appears and starts making killer icicles rain down. The guy seems to have a beef with Cole but we don’t know why. A woman named Jade and an Aussie dude named Kano come to Cole’s rescue, rushing both him and his daughter away. Cole’s wife, unfortunately, doesn’t make it, turned into an icicle and then blown into a million pieces by Sub-Zero.
It’s here where we learn that a big fight tournament is coming up – Mortal Kombat – but the baddies want to kill off all the good guys beforehand so they don’t even have to bother with the tournament. Cheaters!
Once Cole and his new friends get some distance from Sub-Zero, we learn that Cole has a very rare medallion in his possession with a dragon’s head on it. The only people who have that, Jade explains, are mortal kombat warriors, the greatest fighters in the universe. Since Cole sucks at fighting, they deduce that it must have been his father’s, who Cole’s never met.
When they’re snuffed out again by the bad guys – this time by a dude named Reptile who, yes, has a lizard head – they barely kill him. Afterwards, Liu Kang, one of the greatest warriors on earth, arrives, and says we have to go to the great temple to talk to Raiden, who’s in charge of the Mortal Kombat Tournament.
Once at the temple, several baddies, including that pesky Sub-Zero, show up to fight them AGAIN. But this time Raiden, who’s a God, steps in, and offers a Mr. Miagi special: “Save it for the tournament in four days!” The bad guys reluctantly back off. But they’re not worried. The humans are so outmatched that they’re going to get slaughtered. And, once that happens, not only will Group Evil win the tournament, THEY’LL WIN EARTH!
The first thing I want you to look at here is how Russo structured his story. Because it’s actually quite clever.
Say you’ve been given the task of writing Mortal Kombat. What does everybody know about Mortal Kombat? There’s a tournament where all the fighters fight each other. So that’s obviously going to be your ending.
But what do you do in the meantime? What average-to-bad writers do is use all the lead-up to the tournament as setup. They’ve got a ton of characters to introduce so they’re going to utilize every one of those pages to set our tournament characters up one by one. Then, they bring all the good guys together. There’s probably a lot of conflict because everybody has a different opinion on how to do this. So we get a lot tough-guy banter. And then we get our tournament. The End.
Your screenplay will die if you take that approach.
Why?
Because setup is information. It’s not drama. It’s not entertainment – even if you sprinkle some fights in there. Without any engine pushing the characters forward, we’re just waiting around meeting people. I just encountered this in a script I read over the weekend. The first 30 pages was the writer conveying information without any drama.
So, what Russo does to kombat this is he creates this little storyline by which the bad guys, led by Sub-Zero, want to kill all of earth’s competitors before the tournament starts. Why wait for the tournament when you can take everyone out now? This initiates Sub-Zero to go after Cole and Sonya and Jax and Kano, which puts them on the run. Which means that we’re still meeting all of our characters, just like we would in the bad writer’s version, but we’re meeting them ON THE MOVE, AS THINGS ARE HAPPENING, IN THE MIDST OF DRAMA. Which is not only more exciting but required in a movie like this.
Let’s talk about another thing that pro writers understand.
The biggest problems that the Mortal Kombats of the world face is that they commonly lack soul. Without soul, a movie is a lifeless experience. It is eye-candy and nothing more. So how does one create soul within a movie?
The best way is through the main character. The main character is our vessel through which we experience the story. So if you can create a character who’s going through something universal that people can relate to, then we will feel a connection to them. There are other things you can do as well. But that’s your starting point.
Russo makes Cole our main character.
And Cole is in a situation that a lot of adults have either experienced or experienced something similar to. He and his wife are separated. They’re sharing custody of their child. It’s not easy. A part of each of them still wants to be together. But they don’t see eye to eye on big issues, such as what Cole wants to do with his profession. So we understand what Cole is feeling. Which means we have a connection with him.
Now, not everyone has their separated wife frozen and broken into a million pieces in front of their eyes. But loss is a universal experience. And since Russo did a good job of establishing this broken marriage and hinting at them fixing things, it hits us hard when she dies, and we want Cole to get revenge.
Something more specific to these types of assignments is you’re looking for the stand-out characters so you can feature them. When you play Mortal Kombat, it’s clear that Sub-Zero is a special character. There’s something unique and scary and badass and cool about him all at once. So Ross wisely made him the primary antagonist in the story. Don’t try to make weak characters from source material strong. Lean into the characters that already work. They’re your secret weapon.
Finally, just as a creative choice, I liked what Russo did with the human characters. He did a great job establishing how big of underdogs they were against the bad guys, who were all from different dimensions and had otherworldly powers. Cole couldn’t even beat up a 180 pound amateur boxer at the beginning of the movie. How is he going to defeat someone who can throw a freeze-spell at you, turning you into ice? Ditto with everyone else. Not only were they outmatched, but 9 tournaments have already been won. If the bad guys win this last tournament, earth is theirs. Talk about high stakes.
The only problem with Mortal Kombat is that it can’t escape its goofy mythological roots. I still don’t even know how it works. There’s different dimensions and the tournament is held on different planets in different dimensions all the time? Or something? If things would’ve been clearer, I might’ve upgraded my rating. But you can only give a script that contains a random monster with 4 arms so much screenplay cred. Which means Mortal Kombat skates by with a ‘worth the read.’
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When you’re adapting something silly, it’s always a good idea to create a character that calls the silliness out. If Mortal Kombat takes itself too seriously, you’re going to lose your audience. Here, we have Jade explaining how Mortal Kombat works to both Cole and Kano: “They weren’t repeating stories they heard… they were reporting things they saw. That one shared myth was no myth. It was true. At various points in the past, Earth’s greatest champions went to war for mankind’s survival. An eternal war. To protect Earth from foreign enemies. The war was known as: (points to written symbol) Mortal Kombat.” Kano then pops in. “ Did you make that part up? (off Sonya’s look) It sounds like you made it up. Plus you spelled it wrong.” You gotta have some fun, man.
