Mortal Kombat (2021 Film)

I loved the 1995 Mortal Kombat film at the time, but it hasn't aged well.  The 1997 sequel was simply terrible, though it did have a couple of decent fights.  

So how does the new one hold up?  Well, it's a solid movie, with decent fight choreography, much better special effects, and less of the campy tone that plagues the '95 version.  But I don't know, I think the 90's cheese actually helped original movie.  Let's face it, the MK universe is hard to take too seriously.

The 2021 movie can't seem to decide whether it's serious or light-hearted.  If you judge it by the opening scene, it could be a serious martial arts film with a Mortal Kombat skin.  But the more the movie goes on, the sillier it gets, with characters learning how to fire their signature energy blasts and eye lasers.

I'm not fond of the selection of characters.  It has a fairly small cast, and ignores several popular fighters like Johnny Cage and Kitana.  And yet it has room for more obscure fighters like Nitara and Reiko.  Of course they're saving some characters for the sequel - the movie doesn't just imply this, it outright says it.

It's a lot bloodier than the 1995 film, and it isn't shy about killing off characters.  Some of the fatalities and special moves are right out of the games, and they look great.  You will have to turn off your brain, though, as the laws of physics don't apply here.

It's just, I don't know, maybe I'm the one who changed, but... I still remember a lot of lines from the original movie, even though I haven't seen it in years.  I've already forgotten large parts of the new movie, even though I watched it a couple of hours ago.  

It just feels like it's missing something.  Not enough happens; it feels too short and anticlimactic.  I don't want to spoil anything, but it feels like they picked a weird place to end the movie.  It almost feels like the pilot for a TV series instead of a movie.

All in all, it's not a bad "turn your brain off and enjoy the violence" action movie.  It has a lot of Easter eggs for fans of the games, and references a lot of characters who aren't in the movie.  But even non-gamers might find something to enjoy here, if they're into bloody fight scenes.  Just don't expect it to make sense.

Ranking the Aliens/Predator Movies

1. Aliens (1986)
2. Alien (1979)
3. Predators (2010)
4. Predator (1987)
5. Predator 2 (1990)
6. Alien vs. Predator (2004)
7. Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)
8. Alien Resurrection (1997)
9. Prometheus (2012)
10. Alien: Covenant (2017)
11. Alien 3 (1992)

I was waiting to post this until I'd seen all of them.  I just watched Alien: Covenant today.  I still have not seen 2018's "The Predator", but I doubt I ever will, so I just left it off the list.  No big loss, from what I hear, it would be toward the bottom of the list anyway.

Some specifics:

Aliens is still one of my all-time favorite movies.  But I've already gushed about it on several blogs already, so 'nuff said.

Alien still holds up as an excellent horror film.  Smart, suspenseful, and genuinely scary.

Predators is the best Predator movie, even outshining the original.  The action, special effects, pacing - it's just an all around good time.

The original Predator is basically "Alien set in the jungle," and that's okay.  It still does a better job of being an Alien movie than the later Alien movies do.

Predator 2 is kind of forgettable, but I still enjoyed it.

AVP and AVP Requiem are pure fanservice.  They don't even pretend to make sense if you're not a fan of both franchises.  I wouldn't call either one a good movie, but "versus" movies don't have to be.  Nobody went to see Freddy Vs. Jason expecting Shakespeare.

Alien Resurrection is just... okay.  Nothing I'd watch over and over, but it's solid.

Prometheus and Alien: Covenant... Okay, here's the thing.  In 1979, budding director Ridley Scott filmed an excellent sci-fi horror movie.  It was his second film, and it put him well on his way to being one of the big names in movies.  Now, I have a theory - Now that Scott is such a big name serious director, I think he's a little embarrassed that one of his most popular movies is basically a slasher movie.

Like I said above, Alien is a smart movie.  But when you really look at it, it is basically Friday the 13th in space.  There's nothing wrong with that... unless you're a pretentious director who doesn't want to admit he ever did anything lowbrow.  So what if, instead of disowning such a well-known movie, he tried to lend legitimacy to it with a couple of heavy-handed prequels?  

The Alien prequels try to hit you over the head with deeper themes about the origins of life, but the truth is, they're also still slasher films.  Ridley Scott does what he does best - makes movies much slower than they needed to be, and tries to give them meaning.  But I don't need Alien to have deeper meaning, I just want to watch xenomorphs eat people.

The worst part about the prequels is they don't fit the rest of the series.  Alien can either belong in the same universe as its sequels, or it can belong in the same universe as its prequels, but not both.  And the Cameron version of the Alienverse is much cooler than the Scott version.  I hope I live to see the day when someone like James Cameron gets their hands on the franchise again.

Alien 3 is still crap.

GI Joe: Operation Blackout

My two biggest loves as a kid - after Star Wars, of course - were GI Joe and the Transformers.  Unfortunately, neither property had enough video games when I was growing up.  I owned a GI Joe game and a Transformers game on my Commodore 64, both of which sucked even by the standards of the time.  But I still played the hell out of them.

The GI Joe game was especially fun with friends.  It was basically a one-on-one deathmatch between two players (or 1 player vs CPU).  You each picked a character (12 Joes, 8 Cobras), and you would just wander around the screen shooting each other.  After each shot, you had to wait several seconds for your weapon to reload.

The different characters had different walking speeds, weapon speeds, and weapon power.  It was balanced so that the characters with the slowest weapons did the most damage.  There was also a vehicle mode where you picked one of four different Joe vehicles, and just drove/flew around shooting at Cobra vehicles.  

Honestly, it was a bad game.  The load times were excruciating, the gameplay was simplistic, and the only reason my friends and I enjoyed it was because of the toy tie-in.  And yet, I think I'd still rather play it again than the newest GI Joe game, Operation Blackout.

Now, I knew going in that Operation Blackout wasn't very good.  I'd read several negative reviews, and really wasn't expecting much from it.  I'd already played the beautiful but underwhelming "Transformers: Devastation" a few years ago, and was expecting something about on the same level.  The trailers for Operation Blackout at least looked kind of neat, with cel-shaded graphics reminiscent of the 80s cartoon.

Where do I begin.  For starters, somehow the graphics look better in the videos than they do while you're playing.  While Devastation did a great job nailing the look of the Transformers cartoon, Operation Blackout looks like an early attempt at cel shading from the mid 2000s.  

The controls are serviceable, but I have to question some of the gameplay choices.  Like, you have a reload button, which you end up having to use every 10 seconds.  I mean, this isn't Call of Duty, this is G.I.-frikking-Joe here, based on a cartoon where nobody ever ran out of ammo.  I don't need simulationist gameplay in my 80s nostalgia.

The mission objectives are sometimes unclear, the boss fights take forever, and the difficulty is... well, I won't say it's hard, but I will say that the easiest setting still wasn't as easy as one might expect.  Also, I played through one of the blandest vehicle levels I've ever seen in a video game.

But I think the worst part is the overall presentation.  Between levels the story plays out in cut scenes that are supposed to look like a comic book.  Unfortunately, they don't.  Instead, they just look like early storyboard sketches, as if they intended to animate them eventually and and never got around to it.  

And the voice acting is so inconsistent.  I swear the voice actors kept changing their minds on how they wanted to play certain characters.  Destro starts out sounding like a generic Doctor Doom voice, then switches to a Scottish accent, which gradually fades into a more generic foreign accent.  And don't get me started on Storm Shadow, whose voice would probably get them accused of racism if this game were good enough to get noticed at all.  At least Cobra Commander was... okay.

Now, I don't regret my purchase.  For one thing, I waited until the game was on sale.  For another, I used reward points to buy it, so it was practically free.  I knew what I was getting into, and it was worth the money to play it for myself.  I don't mind bad games if they tickle the right nostalgia button, but this game doesn't quite reach it.

Here's a longplay of Operation Blackout (not mine): 

The New Captain America

So, we're three episodes into Falcon & The Winter Soldier.  Audiences hate the new Captain America, John Walker.  So much so that the actor is getting death threats.  The character has been the source of all kinds of memes, complaining about how much they hate this guy taking the shield.

Look - it already takes a special kind of crazy to go after an actor for playing a character you don't like.  But complaining about this guy being the new Captain America... can you just wait until all the episodes are out, please?

John Walker getting the shield sets up some of the conflict in the series.  But it seems pretty obvious that he won't be Captain America at the end of the series.  Maybe Walker will become a bad guy, maybe he'll get killed, maybe he'll give up the shield to be USAgent.  Maybe Falcon will end up with the shield, maybe Bucky, heck, maybe even Sharon Carter.  

My point is, wait until all the data is out before whining.  I seriously doubt the MCU intends Walker to be the new Captain America going forward.  If I'm wrong, fine, but at least wait until the end of the series to complain.