Mortal Kombat II Director Reveals How the Film Revives Classic '90s Game Aesthetics

Director Simon McQuoid sits in a cerulean void during a weekend in Los Angeles, a deliberate choice that mirrors the Blue Portal battle arena—a hidden secret from the original Mortal Kombat II video game, first 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 explains.

The Pit, along with characters Sonja (Jessica McNamee) and Sindel (Ana Thu Nguyen), is intentionally designed to evoke the early days of Mortal Kombat, when arcade cabinets and cartridges were common—and often banned by concerned parents. This taboo made the Pit’s menacing six-foot spikes even more alluring to millennials and Gen-Xers, including McQuoid and the film’s creators.

“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.”

For Mortal Kombat II, embracing the OG aesthetic has been a core mission. McQuoid previously told Den of Geek that he aimed to make the film “feel like a full feature [version] of the first film’s opening scene.”

This commitment led to creative choices like the Blue Portal’s reimagining. “If you look at the original version of the Blue Portal—it was this swirl—and I thought, ‘How do we make this the most beautiful?’ I wanted it to have this grace and scale, and beauty to it,” McQuoid says.

That beauty contrasts sharply with the franchise’s signature brutality, such as the risk of landing atop a buzzsaw. Such risks define the balance between grace and gore in Mortal Kombat II.

Mortal Kombat II opens in theaters on Friday, May 8.