Borderland
I’m not sure it’s possible to make a good Borderlands movie, and this definitely isn’t one.
Considered one of the worst video game adaptations of all time in a sea of bad video game adaptations, most of which came out a decade or more ago, I had to check out Borderlands for myself. It’s not as bad as 2005’s Uwe Boll, but it’s also not good at all. To talk about this, you should know in advance that I’m someone who has spent hundreds and hundreds of hours in three games and a pre-sequel, and that’s the perspective I’m coming from.
This isn’t a good Borderlands movie, nor is it a good movie, period. It feels like Gearbox and Eli Roth tried to make a difference here by making a crowd-pleasing PG-13 action movie, but vaguely alluding to the games to try and get that crowd to come, too.
But the end result is throwing the Borderlands games against the wall, watching them break, and gluing a handful of semi-recognizable pieces back together. Spoilers follow, but not if you’ve played the games or even know the basics.
Did you think the casting was going to be a problem? Casting is a problem. In some cases, it’s actually… okay. I think the best cast character is Marcus, with all of his 90 seconds of screen time. War just has to look like War, and War has to say things like “I’ll lick your back!” and he does. I think Young Gamora/Young Ahsoka Ariana Greenblatt’s promising career will survive this, and with a much better script, she’d be an okay Tina. Oddly enough, I actually kind of liked Jack Black’s Claptrap…? He was really funny at times, and arguably more so than the games.
But Lilith and Roland, man, what were they thinking? Roland is Kevin Hart, who is of course not the stoic, burly soldier he’s supposed to be. He’s Kevin Hart acting maybe 20% less like Kevin Hart than usual, but only that. And physically, he’s, without exaggeration, only slightly taller than Greenblatt’s Tina, and the film does nothing to pretend otherwise.
Cate Blanchett
Cate Blanchett is the most enigmatic casting here in the role of Lilith. I have no idea how they got the two-time Oscar winner, except perhaps boredom on her part and an inexplicable desire to replicate her character’s development in Tar. But as a player, the age difference between her and the original Lilith is jarring. And not just as a casting decision, but from a story perspective. In the film, Tannis and Moxxi tell her about their time with their mother and remember her as an eight-year-old. Jamie Lee Curtis is 65, ten years older than Blanchette’s 55. Gina Gershon is 62. It’s just silly.
The script doesn’t resemble any Borderlands game at all, except that it’s vaguely about finding Pandora’s vault. They make the core of the story a non-canon rewrite of Tina becoming a clone created by Atlas using Eridian DNA to open the vault as the “Chosen One,” with her only connection to her original character being her bunny ears and statements like “Dealio.”
Tina is supposed to be the “Daughter of Eridia” of the prophecy, but of course we all know where that is going. Lilith starts the film without siren powers. After about twenty minutes, you know that she, not Tina, is the chosen one and that she gets these siren powers at the very end. Flames. The opening of the safe at the end consists only of floating cubes and tentacles, a reference to a boss fight from the games, with no corresponding fight in the film.
The script isn’t good, but neither is the action. This is what I’m now going to call “Rebel Moon Syndrome,” where a PG-13 cut neuters the action of something that should clearly be R-rated. The blood-soaked, mature-rated games give way to bullets ricocheting off armor and people falling over. I think they were trying to boost box office with the lower rating, but it hurts the film. Not that bloody action would have saved it, but it would have been better than what we got in this cut.
Borderland
This project is pure selfishness. Look at these big stars, we let these characters play even if they don’t make sense! Borderlands fans will definitely come, even if the story and characters are completely different! We are launching the Borderlands cinematic universe to go beyond those annoying gamers!
This will die here. Alone. No more movies. This kind of thing shouldn’t be attempted again. In another world, I can imagine a cool animated Borderlands series might have worked on Netflix. But whatever top-notch blockbuster this was supposed to be, despite a few brief moments where it works, it mostly doesn’t, and it actually makes me worry about Borderlands 4 if the studio thinks something like this is good now.
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