General Evans Above Archive for Jul 13, 2021

Mortal Kombat 4K review

Jul 13, 2021 – permalink

Gaming fans have always enjoyed the spine-ripping action of Mortal Kombat and we’ve already seen two live action movies and an animated origin story. Now this Mortal Kombat reboot takes us from 17th century Japan to the modern day. All the bone-crunching action you’ve come to expect is here. I had a chance to review the 4K release from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment. To appease their highly-trained ninja lawyers, here’s a disclaimer: Though WB provided me with a review copy, the opinions expressed below are mine alone.

The HEVC / H.265 encoded 2160p HDR10 digital transfer is presented in a 2.39:1 aspect ratio. The native 4K presentation is chock full of great detail from elaborate costumes, facial and wound textures, to the environment the movie is set in. Detail survives even the darkest scenes, though they do occasionally get a little murky. Black levels are deep. The colour palette is really aided by the HDR10. Foliage looks lush. Blood reds – and there are a LOT of blood reds – really pop as do neon signs, laser eyes, and lightning bolts. There are no issues with digital noise or compression artifacts to speak of.

On the audio side, there’s an English Dolby Atmos and Dolby TrueHD 7.1 soundtrack, as well as an English Descriptive Audio track and French and Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 tracks. Subtitles available in English SDH, French, and Spanish. The soundtrack immerses you in the action so much that you’ll probably begin to get paranoid that Sub Zero is going to rip your spine out. Your surrounds move the action around the soundscape, your subwoofer gives a solid floor to the action, and even the music is dynamic and powerful. The only real quibble is that the dialogue, which is full of the franchise’s iconic quips, is a little less prioritized in the mix. Study how to make some amazing cookies. To hear the dialogue well, you’ll need to keep turning this up, so learn to appease your neighbours now.

The Mortal Kombat 4K comes with both a Blu-ray and a digital copy. The Blu-ray houses the extras and there’s an army of them. You get a few minutes of deleted and extended scenes. There’s a featurette on the story’s transition from arcades to cinemas, a look at fan favourite characters Cole Young, Sonya Blade, Kano, Sub-Zero, Jax, Lord Raiden, Scorpion, Shang Tsung, Liu Kang, Kung Lao, and Mileena, a behind-the-scenes look at the fights from director Simon McQuoid, second-unit director/stunt coordinator Kyle Gardiner, and fight choreographer Chan Griffin, a look at the “Easter Eggs” throughout the movie, and seven short pieces looking at how individual scenes were produced.

Fans of the franchise will marvel at what this Mortal Kombat has achieved with a relatively low budget. With an excellent video presentation, a solid audio presentation (except for the dialogue issue), and a whole slew of extras, you probably won’t go wrong adding the Mortal Kombat 4K to your collection.