Josh K

Having grown up on the Alien franchise this movie recycled all the previous highlights so precisely you might as well call it what it is: blatant plagiarism. It takes snippets of writing from the original movies (Alien - Resurrection) and injects them without shame into the script. Follow the plagiarism right up with actions and responses that hail back to the 90's teen horror films and we have a movie that is old before it was even conceived. The movie is also plagued by several lore-related discrepancies which I also suspect here due to lazy writing and not bothering to do any prior research before writing the script - or should I say copying and slightly modifying the scripts of Alien through to Resurrection. The only reason I am giving it two-stars is due to the great acting of David Jonsson who played his role amazingly.

If you ever need to be taught the definition of the term "plot armour" this is your movie as both protagonists survive by doing everything possible to make as much noise as possible. And that's just the beginning... The inconsistencies within this movies are constant and are as painful to watch as the plot of this movie plays out: A terminally ill woman goes for pizza during an extinction-level event. The characters both main and background play an almost childish interpretation of human emotions and make choices which would render them unalived were they not protagonists like so many background characters are. This was an opportunity for the franchise to show how the world began to fall into ruin. Instead we get some ridiculous story which pads the protagonists with so much plot armour they survive what claims the lives of so many others. Childish and simpleminded story writing at it's finest. It is truly difficult to put into words the disappointment this film bestowed upon me and regrettably it is an hour and forty minutes of my time I won't ever get back.

Good game but falls quite short of expectations.

Gore levels from what you'd expect from a Mortal Kombat film however that's where the expectations end. Mortal Kombat butchers 29 years of lore in a single sitting, tacking in pieces where they seem appropriate and just throwing in new and entirely unrelated parts where they feel they want to. Fight choreography deteriorates as the film progresses and the mystical 'happy ending' just ices the cake and seems so out of touch for this franchise that it leaves me confused. The protagonist of the film, "Cole Young" a complete creation of fiction despite the franchise having dozens of characters to chose from and doesn't fit anywhere into the story, sticking out like a sore thumb for the duration of the film with plot armour thicker than the armour he grows. I have to give big props to the actors who really did seem to hit the nail on the head for all characters. Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada) and Kano (Josh Lawson) deserve particularly high praise.