Director – Rick Morales, Screenplay – Jeremy Adam, Based on the Videogame Created by Ed Boon & John Tobias, Producers – Jim Krieg & Rick Morales, Music – John Jennings Boyd & Eric V. Hachikian, Animation – Digital Emation, Inc. (Directors – Gyungho Choi, Jinhyun Choi, Hyung-Ki Kim & Sangjoon Lee). Production Company – Warner Bros. Animation.
Voices
Manny Jacinto (Kenshi Takahashi), Ron Yuan (Kuai Liang/Sub Zero), David Wenham (Kano), Artt Butler (Shang Tsung), Imari Williams (Tremor), Yuri Lowenthal (Kobra), Keith Silverstein (Kabal), Sumalee Montano (Kindra), Patrick Seitz (Scorpion)
Plot
Earthrealm has been turned into a wasteland after the unleashing of the undead Ravers. Kano has declared himself king of the ruins and makes all swear loyalty to him. The brash young warrior Kenshi Takahashi arrives in a small town, seeking a challenge and easily defeats three of Kano’s warriors. Kenshi recognises an aged man in the market as having the tattoo of the Liang clan. The old man is Kuai Liang, who renounced the role of Sub-Zero after his powers went awry and now lives as a farmer. Kano’s warriors return, accompanied by the Tremor who beats Kenshi up. Kenshi meets the aging Shang Tsung who tells him he can gain a powerful sword. He takes Kenshi to the Well of Souls, getting Kenshi to use his hereditary blood to open it. However, the flood of souls that emerges causes Kenshi to be blinded. Shang Tsung then absorbs the souls and shoves Kenshi down the well. There Kenshi discovers the sword’s power. He staggers out and is found by Kuai Liang who teaches Kenshi to live with his blindness and wield the power of the sword.
Mortal Kombat (1992) was a computer game, initially released to video arcades and not long after for home computers. In the game, players could adopt roles as various fighters and would engage in a series of combat moves up against opponents. The game was first adapted to film with Paul W.S. Anderson’s okay live-action Mortal Kombat (1995), followed by the universally disliked sequel Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997) and a short-lived live-action tv show Mortal Kombat: Conquest (1998-9). Two decades later, the game was resurrected with the live-action film Mortal Kombat (2021) that was intended to launch a new franchise. Twelve months before the reboot, there was the animated film Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpion’s Revenge (2020). This was the first in an animated trilogy and was followed by Mortal Kombat Legends: Battle of the Realms (2021), followed by Mortal Kombat Legends: Snow Blind here and the subsequent Mortal Kombat Legends: Cage Fight (2023), each being released a year apart.
Scorpion’s Revenge worked well. However, when it came to Battle of the Realms it felt that those appeals had toppled over and the film was simply sequential combat sequences featuring so many characters that one became confused trying to keep up. The good news is that Snow Blind picks up again after such a dip. This it does by largely abandoning the whole Mortal Kombat aspect – there is no tournament for the fate of the realms this time. There are very minor cage fights in the background and assorted combat sequences throughout but the film is not interested in any of the faceoffs in the arena.
Moreover, Snow Blind dispenses with most of the familiar characters – Johnny Cage, Sonya Blade. Lord Raiden etc – and gives us familiar ones like Luai Liang/Sub Zero as a very old man, or places the focus on the lesser-known Kenshi, a playable character who has not appeared on screen before. The setting is not any of the realms but a post-apocalyptic Earth in the aftermath of what seems to resemble a zombie apocalypse. Here the film does follow on in continuity from the cliffhanger that was left at the end of Battle of the Realms.
The blind swordsman Kenshi Takahashi
In its place, we have a story that is fairly familiar from the Martial Arts Film – the cocky upstart who undergoes a humiliation by the Big Bad and has to undergo a training regimen to harness his powers/abilities and win the day. However, the story throws some interesting spins onto this. One of these is the character of Kenshi, the swordsman who is blinded and then has to relearn how to use his other senses. This borrows a good deal from the long-running series of Japanese films about the blind swordsman Zatoichi, although places a fantastical spin on it that Kenshi can see or at least gains a Daredevil-like sense of spatial surroundings when he is holding his sword. This Snow Blind does a reasonable job of telling.
Certainty, there is the familiar over-the-top violence of the two other animated films. As with the other two films, Snow Blind opens on a scene of ultra-violent carnage as we see bodies crushed under a steam-roller, arms ripped off, heads severed and impaled against walls with swords, and the familiar effect of seeing x-rays of heads as people are shot and watching the brain explode in slow motion as bullets go through it. It all comes together for a decent climactic battle, which was far more memorable than the one that capped Battle of the Realms.
