Mortal Kombat was built in Adelaide and it sounds like a city trying to punch above its weight

The first sound you register in Simon McQuoid’s Mortal Kombat is not the iconic theme. It is silence, followed by wind, followed by the scrape of wood against stone, and then a blade entering a body with the wet particularity that only practical foley can achieve. The prologue is set in seventeenth-century Japan, and it is scored with restraint that the rest of the film will not sustain, but the restraint matters because it establishes a baseline. Benjamin Wallfisch, who composed the score, understands that volume requires context. Loud means nothing without quiet. Attack means nothing without the space before it. The first ten minutes of Mortal Kombat are that space: a held breath, precisely shaped, before the fist connects.

The film was shot entirely at Adelaide Studios, the South Australian production facility that has spent two decades building itself into a viable alternative to the eastern-seaboard hubs of Sydney and Melbourne. Adelaide has always occupied an odd position in Australia’s screen industry: too small to compete on volume, too far from the production networks that cluster around Fox Studios and Docklands, but possessed of a state government that has been willing to subsidise the difference with tax offsets and infrastructure investment. The result is a facility that punches above its weight, and Mortal Kombat, a Warner Bros. production with a reported budget of US$55 million, is the sound of that ambition made literal.

The theme, reworked

Every adaptation of Mortal Kombat must eventually contend with the theme. The Immortals’ 1994 track, built on a techno kick drum and a shouted vocal sample, is one of the most recognisable pieces of music in video game history. It is also, compositionally, a blunt instrument: four bars of rhythmic aggression repeated until the listener either surrenders or leaves the room. Wallfisch’s approach is to absorb the theme rather than quote it. The melodic shape appears in fragments, buried inside orchestral textures, surfacing in brass stabs and distorted string ostinatos that carry the original’s energy without reproducing its form. The effect is recognition without nostalgia. You feel the theme before you hear it, and when you hear it, it has been transformed into something that belongs to this film rather than to 1994.

The orchestral recording was done with the Budapest Film Orchestra, not in Adelaide, and this split is worth noting because it mirrors a tension that runs through the production itself. The film’s physical infrastructure, its sets and stages and stunt work and creature effects, was South Australian. Its post-production, its visual effects, its orchestral score, was global. This is how blockbusters work now: the shoot happens in one place and the finishing happens everywhere, and the location credit is both real and partial. Adelaide built Mortal Kombat’s body. Budapest, LA and London built its voice.

The electronic bruise

Wallfisch layers the orchestral material with electronic production that draws from industrial and dubstep textures: sub-bass drops that sit below the threshold of melodic perception, distorted synth pads that sustain through fight sequences like tinnitus, rhythmic programming that locks to the choreography of the combat. The electronic elements do not ornament the orchestra; they occupy a different register entirely, low and physical where the strings are high and gestural. The combination produces a score that operates on two planes simultaneously, one that you hear and one that you feel in your sternum, and the fight sequences benefit from this layering because the music matches the film’s own split between the graceful and the brutal.

The Sub-Zero sequences are scored with particular care. Joe Taslim’s performance as the cryomancer Bi-Han is the film’s most physically compelling, and Wallfisch supports it with cues that use frozen textures, reversed samples, crystalline delays that decay into silence like ice cracking. There is a precision to these cues that the rest of the score does not always achieve; the Sub-Zero material sounds composed in the classical sense, each element placed deliberately, while the broader fight music sometimes defaults to the kind of percussive escalation that blockbuster scores lean on when they run out of ideas. The unevenness is itself revealing. When the film knows what it is, the score knows what it is. When the film is merely loud, the score is loud with it.

Adelaide’s echo

What Mortal Kombat meant for Adelaide Studios was both immediate and structural. The production employed over 580 South Australian crew members and occupied the facility for months. It demonstrated that Adelaide could handle a production of this scale, not just logistically but creatively: the stunt work, coordinated by Kyle Gardiner’s team, was complex and largely practical, and the stages accommodated sets that required the kind of vertical space that older Australian studios struggle to provide.

The acoustic character of the stages themselves is not something that appears in the credits, but it is present in the film’s sound design. Adelaide Studios’ stages are large and relatively dry, without the reflective surfaces that produce the boomy ambience of older facilities. The foley and ADR recorded there have a closeness, an intimacy of impact, that suits a fighting film. When a punch lands in Mortal Kombat, you hear the knuckle, the skin, the breath expelled. This is partly the work of the sound team and partly the room itself, the particular acoustic signature of a space built for this purpose in a city that has been building toward this moment for years.

The fist and the frequency

The score’s final gesture is worth noting. As the film closes, Wallfisch allows the iconic theme to surface fully for the first time, not as a background allusion but as a direct statement, brass and electronics locked together, the original’s rhythmic DNA intact but orchestrated with a weight that the 1994 track never attempted. It arrives like a concession and a declaration simultaneously: this is what you came for, and this is what we have made of it. The moment works because Wallfisch has earned it, spending two hours building a sonic world complex enough that the simple melody, when it finally appears unadorned, carries the accumulated tension of everything that preceded it. Decay after sustained attack. The space after the fist. Adelaide’s echo, fading into the frequency range where memory and muscle live, where a city’s ambition and a franchise’s history meet in a register that is felt rather than heard.