Posted by I try not to be overly negative in my reviews. I try to focus on positives where there are while still acknowledging the negative. My review for Borderlands is going to be overwhelmingly negative. I knew from the moment I read the plot synopsis months ago that this movie was going to be an insult to the Borderlands franchise, and oh boy was I right. Borderlands was a disappointing mess that wasn’t sure what it was trying to be. It has moments and details that are so close to capturing the essence of the game, but then immediately proceeds to either do nothing with it or take it in the completely wrong direction.
SPOILERS FOLLOW
The plot for Borderlands was generic, bland, and tends to disregard the source material. Borderlands tries to be a weird amalgamation of the first two games and catastrophically fails to be both. The premise of the first game is that a party of four vault hunters work together to navigate the wastelands of Pandora, fighting bandits, local wildlife, and eventually the Atlas Corporation’s private army the Crimson Lance in search of a mysterious Vault and its key. The premise of the second game is that a party of four vault hunters do the same thing, but this time they’re trying to stop a corporation from opening a Vault and using the dangerous monster imprisoned within. So where does the movie go wrong? The first scene. We get a rescue scene straight out of Star Wars where Roland tries to save Tiny Tina from her imprisonment, only for everything to go wrong. They also run into the psycho Krieg who joins them. Oh and Tiny Tina isn’t an explosive obsessed orphan who lost her parents to bandits and corporation inhumanity, but is instead the daughter of Deukalian Atlas, the president of the Atlas Corporation, who he created with the blood of the alien Eridians to open the Vault they created. Atlas then hires the bounty hunter Lilith to hunt Tina down, only for her to end up siding with Tina and her allies in a race to the Vault. Lilith and company assembles the key and are about to open the Vault when Atlas and his Crimson Lance arrive to take the spoils. In a surprising twist that should shock absolutely no one that played any of the games, Lilith opens the Vault because she’s the chosen one from the prophecy about opening the Vault. She becomes the Firehawk, an Eridian goddess, and defeats the Crimson Lance, with a little help from her allies. Atlas makes one final play by taking Tina hostage, and Lilith takes him into the Vault where she leaves him to get eaten by a monster inside. Everything about the plot is bland, generic, and soulless. It takes the safest plot imaginable and uses the Borderlands IP as a suit to do it.
I could write for hours about the countless errors and inaccuracies in this film adaptation. For example, the Firehawk in the games isn’t an Eridian goddess at all; it’s a name Lilith uses to hide from the main antagonist of the second game. The movie is riddled with similar inaccuracies and just strange decisions in general. The movie seems to want to follow the premise of the first game, but it replaces half of the cast. The first game’s vault hunters consisted of Roland, Lilith, Brick, and Mordecai. Brick and Mordecai are seemingly replaced by Krieg and maybe Tina? Krieg and Brick could be swapped around fairly easily, so the decision to use Krieg over Brick baffles me. Same with Tina. Sure she’s a popular NPC in the second game, but she’s not the same kind of integral character that someone like Lilith is. And of the characters included, a lot of them are changed in baffling ways. I’ve already detailed Tina’s utterly ridiculous backstory, but Lilith’s is just as bad. First and foremost, she constantly reminds people that she’s a bounty hunter, not a vault hunter, and she hates Pandora. It’s eventually revealed that her mother was a Dahl scientist who knew Lilith was the chosen one, but had to send her away when bandits attacked them. In her final moments, the mother, a Dahl scientist, recorded this explanation to her daughter in Claptrap, a Hyperion robot, that was triggered when he saw a specific drawing in Lilith’s old home that she drew. All of these revelations are so predictable, boring, and improbable. What are the odds Lilith would revisit her home with Claptrap and trigger this message? Why was a Dahl scientist using Hyperion technology when the corporations are always trying to be better than the competition so they’d never use technology that wasn’t theirs? The plot is so cliched and contrived that it even does the annoying “character 1 sees character 2 having a conversation but only hears part of it, misconstrues it, and gets mad” trope, but the movie is too lazy to make that interaction even matter.
Another aspect of the film I take issue with is the main antagonist: Deukalian Atlas. He’s a rich, arrogant, power hungry man that would sacrifice anything for what the Vault contains. He’s exactly the kind of person that we’ve seen run corporations in the games, so that’s something the movie did well, right? Well, it would have if Deukalian Atlas actually existed and wasn’t just made up for the movie. Why not use an already existing character? Why make an antagonist up? Another antagonist I have an issue with is Knoxx. In the games, General Knoxx is a sarcastic, wisecracking commander of the Crimson Lance who uses a mech suit. In the movie, Knoxx is your standard loyal commander of the Crimson Lance, except at the very end when she tries to switch sides. Why the change? Why not just using the already existing character of Commandant Steele who’s already more similar to movie Knoxx? Why repurpose a good character like General Knoxx and do nothing with him?
My central issue with the movie is that it tries to use things from the game and make references, but then the movie changes things for no discernible reason. For example, there’s a poster for Face McShooty and graffiti referencing the bandit chief Krom who later appears during the final battle and is clearly supposed to be important but the movie is too lazy to actually hype him up, but characters like Scooter, Mordecai, Brick, Dr. Zed, and all the other vault hunters from Borderlands 2 other than Krieg are nowhere to be seen. Even the Vault is fumbled. In the first game, it’s revealed that the Vault is just a prison housing a terrifying monster, almost as if the entire premise of the game is a reference to Pandora’s box. In the movie, the Vault contains Eridian technology. It contains exactly what it’s not supposed to. Oh and it does have a monster but the monster never breaks free and is content to just snack on Atlas in Vault prison. The movie somehow fumbles the reveal of the Destroyer worse than the game did. The movie constantly hints at what could be, but never commits, like when it directly shows corrosion as an element, yet every single gun used is a standard ammo weapon; elemental weapons are completely lacking. For a movie based on a video game, there’s a surprisingly lack of video game elements. Characters don’t have special abilities other than gun. Similarly, the costuming, namely for the bandits, feels too clean. The bandits and psychos supposedly live in squalor and raise mayhem wherever they go, yet they look like they shower every night. The Crimson Lance look ok, but their weapons look like they’re made of cardboard.
Turning to the action sequences, cinematography, and CGI, it’s all mediocre. The action feels bland and boring. Characters flip over boxes and fire guns and nameless goons fall down. There’s no blood. There’s nothing interesting. It’s just clean and sanitized action that’s barely stylized. I’ve seen NERF War YouTube videos a decade ago with more effort put into the gunfights. The Borderlands games are violent. I’m not saying the movie needs to show people getting disintegrated by acid or shocked into ash so nothing remains but eyeballs, but also Krieg swinging his buzz axe should do more than just knock a guy down in one piece. The cinematography isn’t anything special. There is a sequence during the escape from the Bloodshots that strikes me as Eli Roth flexing his horror movie director skills, but the sequence is hard to watch because of the flashing lights. It feels out of place. The CGI feels half-baked and not quite right. It’s very uncanny, and I suspect the movie won’t age very well as a result.
My final complaint about the movie is that while Cate Blanchett and Jamie Lee Curtis do an ok job of playing Lilith and Dr. Patricia Tannis respectively, they’re just too old. They fail to really capture the essences of the characters, especially Tennis. She’s neurotic and has a lot of eccentricities. Some of those mannerisms come through, but it’s just not enough. As for the rest of the cast, I think they actually do a surprisingly good job. Ariana Greenblatt does a solid job as Tina, even if her performance falls flat at times, namely at the beginning. Kevin Hart as Roland is surprisingly well done. He’s able to play the roll seriously when it has to be serious while also nailing a lot of the one-liners. The two standout performances in my opinion are Jack Black as Claptrap and Florian Munteanu as Krieg. Both of them absolutely nail their respective characters. Another part of the movie that I liked was the score.
SPOILERS END
Overall, Borderlands is a mediocre movie and an outright terrible adaptation of the video games it’s supposedly based on. It takes characters and details from the games, then changes them for no discernible reason. I’ll acknowledge that one struggle of making a movie like this is trying to use characters that lack a personality because they’re meant to be self-inserts for the player. Well, that could be a struggle if the sequel to the game didn’t then make those players NPCs and give them well-defined characteristics and personality traits. Borderlands really isn’t worth watching. The humor present is fine, but the games do it better. The world feels empty and looks uncanny while also being generic. Wildlife, civilians, and bandits are largely absent except for when the the plot demands it. The result is an empty, boring world. The movie constantly takes and twists the source material in baffling ways, such as only ever referring to Lilith as a Siren once at the very end of the movie. Borderlands disappointed me not because it was bad, but because it was so aggressively average that it’s neither “so bad it’s good” or just plain good, but is instead weighed down by mediocre tropes, a safe and contrived plot, bizarre casting decisions, and a general vibe that the writers of the movie spent thirty minutes combing the Borderlands wiki to piece together a Frankenstein’s monster of a plot masquerading as a stereotypical action movie.
Broad Scope Entertainment 