The upcoming Mortal Kombat movie has its Jax, Mileena, Raiden and Liu Kang, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
For those interested here is the full rundown of the new castings. Mehcad Brooks from Supergirl will be taking on Jaxx Briggs; Sisi Stringer will be doing one of her first acting roles as Mileena; Thor: Ragnarok‘s Tadonobu Asano will be cast as Raiden, the eternal god of thunder; Ludi Lin from the recent Power Rangers reboot will be put into the iconic starring role of Liu Kang.
We don’t know much about the story, but the fact that this film is two years from release hasn’t stopped people from trying to stoke reactionary outrage over the race of some actors not matching the canonical race of the characters. Of course, it’s all just a thin smokescreen for conservative politics being injected into entertainment, as this fake outrage over the race of actors and characters is so common and transparent. The question you have to ask yourself is, is the race of the character integral to their story? After all, these are fictional characters that exist in their own universe, and are thus plastic to both artistic interpretation and the rules of their story. A perfect example of where it doesn’t, and completely invalidated these race-baiting complaints, was about Noma Dumezweni playing Hermione Granger in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. That character is canonically depicted as white, but was played by a black actor in the stage play. Her race was literally inconsequential to her story, and the same can be said about the two characters that crybabies are whining about.
But there is even more justification to not care about what those stoking misinformed outrage think. Writer Greg Russo has previously said the movie will be R-rated and feature fatalities, so it seems like the team behind it is trying to capture the extreme violence at the very least. And since the common justification for this outrage is a suspicion that the filmmakers will make changes that ruin the film, it’s easy to see how shallow the critique is at this point. Of course, there’s nothing that they have to base it on other than complaints about superficial changes that have no impact on the story. It’s not like they walked out a giant battlemech in preview images yet.
The film is due to land on March 5, 2021.