Director Simon McQuoid is sitting in a blue void when we catch up with him during a weekend in LA. He prefers it that way. Which makes sense when one realizes the cerulean-tinged vortex around us more or less recreates the Blue Portal battle arena, one of the surprise secrets in the OG Mortal Kombat II video game from way back when it was ported to the Sega Genesis in 1994.
“One of the things we wanted to do with our tournaments and arena is to take the arenas from the very early games, like ‘the Pit,’ where Sonja and Sindel fight, or the Blue Portal, and bring them up onto a massive cinematic scale,” McQuoid says.
The Pit of which the filmmaker speaks, and for that matter his Sonja (Jessica McNamee) and Sindel (Ana Thu Nguyen), are intentionally designed to echo the old ways of Mortal Kombat games, specifically when they were associated with ominous arcade cabinets and video game cartridges that were verboten in many a concerned parent’s household (including my own). The taboo nature made the menacing six-foot spikes of the Pit arena more tantalizing to many a millennial and Gen-Xer’s mind—including, it would seem, McQuoid and the makers of Mortal Kombat II the movie.
“Taking something that’s an eight-bit, 16-bit concrete bunker from the Pit and scaling it up to be real, with sort of rusty spikes,” McQuoid continues, “once you get back the priority of the characters and their stories, you can put them into these spaces that are visually really exciting. I think it means a lot to the fans.”
