Mortal Kombat Movies May Have One More Lore Fix Left to Do
Mortal Kombat can still let Mileena and Kitana be sisters. Or clones. Or something.
This article contains spoilers for Mortal Kombat II.
The 2021 Mortal Kombat film did a lot right. It bought Joe Taslim, Tadanobu Asano, and Hiroyuki Sanada into the franchise, it put game-accurate fatalities onto the big screen, and it gave us Josh Lawson as a wise-cracking Kano. But the movie also made some strange decisions, most of which director Simon McQuoid corrected in the sequel. Mortal Kombat II did away with arcana and new character Cole Young (the latter in a more spectacular form than the former), and, more importantly, put a Mortal Kombat tournament in the Mortal Kombat movie.
Yet, there’s one last lore problem remaining. While Mortal Kombat II features Edenia princess Kitana as a protagonist, she never mentions her clone/sister Mileena (Sisi Stringer), who died in the first movie. For Kitana’s actor Adeline Rudolph, the connection can still be addressed in future installments. “Kitana is over 10,000 years old. So much time could have passed between that beginning scene of the movie and when we see her as an adult,” Rudolph told Hollywood Reporter. “So I definitely think there is a lot of room left for Mileena to have her own [sisterly] storyline with Kitana. I wouldn’t necessarily close that door.”
In a way, it’s more true to the game for the movies to overcomplicate the Kitana/Mileena storyline. They both debuted in the 1993 video game Mortal Kombat II as palette swaps of one another. Both based on the digital performance of Katalin Zamiar, they each possessed the exact same move set, but Kitana wore blue while Mileena wore pink and had jagged teeth under her mask.
Like all things Mortal Kombat, Kitana and Mileena’s story unfolds through convoluted lore. As seen in the newest movie, Kitana was raised by emperor Shao Kahn, who killed her father Jerrod and took her mother Sindel as his bride after conquering her peaceful home realm of Edenia. Doubting Kitana’s loyalty, Khan commands the sorcerer Shang Tsung to make a double of her. He does, but because he’s a wacky magician, Shang Tsung mixes in some Tarkatan DNA, giving her that toothy grin.
Over the years, the two struggle against one another, adding a wrinkle to Kitana’s battle against Shao Kahn, leading to lots of backstabbing, plot twists, and mistaken identity shenanigans. The soft-reboot in the 2011 game Mortal Kombat X streamlined the story, slightly revising Mileena’s origin to make her the result of Shao Kahn’s attempts to create a perfect daughter. But the hard reboot in the 2023 game Mortal Kombat 1 skips the clone stuff altogether, making Mileena the first daughter of Jerrod and Sindel, who suffers from the Tarkat virus.
Clearly, the franchise has no problem with changing things on the fly. Further, McQuoid’s movies strike the right balance between a respect for the lore and an acknowledgement that much of it is very, very silly. So if the inevitable Mortal Kombat III suddenly has Kitana telling her psueo-sister Jade (Tati Gabrielle) about her clone sister Mileena after ignoring her for a whole movie, no one’s going to be mad—especially if Mileena unleashes a “Tasty Treat” fatality against her sister for forgetting to call on her birthday.
Mortal Kombat II is now in theaters.