Mortal Kombat‘s 2021 reboot cleverly made Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim) the movie’s central villain, rather than squeezing him in as a rival for Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada). It may have been an easier marketing approach for Mortal Kombat to be just an otherworldly martial arts tournament with the villainous sorcerer Shang Tsung at the end, just as the 1995 Mortal Kombat did. Instead, 2021’s Mortal Kombat chose to have Sub-Zero killing Scorpion and his family in the movie’s exciting opening scene to frame the climactic final fight between the two and firmly establish Sub-Zero as the film’s big bad. They did this with good reason.
The rivalry between the two ninjas Scorpion and Sub-Zero goes all the way back to 1993 in the very first Mortal Kombat video game’s character biographies that establish them as hailing from opposing ninja clans. Through various media adaptations, the immortal ninjas Scorpion and Sub-Zero have fought regularly. Yet, when it came time for the 1995 film adaptation, the film chose instead to relegate both ninjas to largely non-verbal villainous support roles as adversaries to the heroes. This was a misstep the Mortal Kombat reboot no doubt sought to correct.
That missed opportunity was rectified with the most recent Mortal Kombat, which finally gave audiences the rivalry they’ve wanted to see on screen. Still, it was a curious decision to extend Sub-Zero’s role beyond being just Scorpion’s rival to make him the movie’s most prominent villain, albeit working on behalf of Shang Tsung (Chin Han). The answer, however, is that the team behind the Mortal Kombat 2021 reboot was likely planning ahead. It’s no secret that film companies love preexisting properties like video games and comic books because they bring with them a built-in audience. While 1995’s Mortal Kombat is a much-loved genre film, it was not especially faithful to its source material in terms of the backstory for Scorpion and Sub-Zero, giving audiences a very different version of Sub-Zero in particular. It seems one of the priorities of 2021’s Mortal Kombat was to straighten out the characters and bring them more in line with the larger brand. It gave audiences what they’d been asking for by making the ninja rivalry the main framing device for the film while leaving the bigger villains in reserve in the hopes of many sequels.
Making Sub-Zero the climactic confrontation of the film uses the character to his fullest. It’s now known that Sub-Zero serves Shang Tsung and that a bigger bad than him, Shao Kahn, appears as a mural and a statue, which offers a handy roadmap for the coming Mortal Kombat antagonists. Mortal Kombat set up Shang Tsung to be the next villain, and Shao Kahn the movie franchise’s equivalent of the final boss. Of course, they could also leave the door open for an unexpected villain like Quan Chi to appear in Mortal Kombat movies of the future. Sub-Zero then gets to be both a celebration of an oft-neglected story beloved by longtime players of the video games and facilitate things to come.
One thing the Mortal Kombat reboot was good at was working against expectations: establishing an original main character with Cole Young (Lewis Tan), eschewing the traditional tournament plot, and embracing peoples’ love of the Sub-Zero character are not just clever gestures. They all feed into a larger structure of trying to maximize the material to allow for as many sequels as possible. Even Sub-Zero’s gruesome death may be part of a bigger more convoluted plan for undead cyberninja robots, but that’s not to say the character was wasted in Mortal Kombat 2021. As any viewer of The Warrior can attest, Joe Taslim is a talented martial artist, and certainly has enough charisma to make an excellent main villain.
