Street Fighter, another movie from my youth. The nineties were those times where we, as children, couldn’t care less about movie mistakes, badly cut scenes, shitty acting, miserable, far-fetched plots and other cinematic faux pas. In the end we all had fun and that’s what this movie is about. As I rarely write something about the plot I also won’t do it this time, if you want to know something check out Wikipedia. In any case, there are other things to write about.
Street Fighter II (the Super Nintendo game) is one of my all-time favorite fighting games and I have to say that I never really tried to compare the movie to the game, I simply accepted that the former is an amazing pearl of trash with really interesting scenes and insinuations most of which I only understood years later. Amongst others, there is this great hommage to the Godzilla movies. While a Chinese member of the multinational military force tapped into Bison’s security system, there all of a sudden are appearing Honda and Zangief fighting on a miniature of Bisonopolis. This scene is overlayed by the typical Godzilla cries.
Another really clever and damn perfect scene is when Gen. M. Bison tries to kill Col. Guile in his stealth boat. Bison’s killing machine looks exactely like the oldschool arcade game machines. This nearly made me cry when I first saw it!
As already pointed out that I never really compared the movie to the game but still there are some aspects which I kind of missed. In the old times I was really pissed that there were a few characters appearing in the flick which weren’t part of the “first” game. As my English was quite bad at that time I made up my own idea of who is a good and who is a bad guy, which was pretty close to the movie but I couldn’t stand these “new” characters (Dee Jay, T-Hawk, Cammy) from other Street Fighter games, which I all hated.
Furthermore I was a bit disappointed that the director decided against the characters’ special moves. No Hadouken, no Sonic Boom, no Yoga Fire and most of all no pausing during Chun-Li’s Spinning Bird Kick (especially the latter one makes me really sad). A few days ago I read an interview with Steven E. de Souza claiming that this was done on purpose because he didn’t want to connect the movie that much to the game. I’m Ok with that now.
In the end, I really do love Street Fighter and it always makes me smile. I feel like being a child again. It is like a time machine and that’s something I really adore because I had a great childhood and love(d) the nineties. You have to check it out.
