Video game adaptations, they’ve been doing well for themselves in the past few years with the likes of Sonic the Hedgehog and the recent hit television show, Fallout. Borderlands is the latest addition in the video game adaptation world, with it having been in development since 2015. That’s almost a decade that this film has been in development, which is almost never a good sign, and Borderlands gives you a 101 lesson on what a troubled development does to a film.
Borderlands follows Lilith (Cate Blanchett), an infamous outlaw with a mysterious past, reluctantly returns to her home planet of Pandora to find the missing daughter of the universe’s most powerful S.O.B., Atlas (Edgar Ramirez). Lilith forms an alliance with an unexpected team — Roland (Kevin Hart), a former elite mercenary, now desperate for redemption; Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), a feral teenage demolitionist; Krieg (Florian Munteanu), Tina’s musclebound, rhetorically challenged protector; Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), the scientist with a tenuous grip on sanity; and Claptrap (Jack Black), a persistently wiseass robot. These unlikely heroes must battle alien monsters and dangerous bandits to find and protect the missing girl, who may hold the key to unimaginable power. The fate of the universe could be in their hands but they’ll be fighting for something more: each other.
For those who are unaware and this is their first venture into the world of Borderlands and Pandora, the games usually involve a group of vault hunters who shouldn’t get along with each other and go on the hunt for vaults around Pandora. The greatest thing about this franchise is the wacky characters they meet along the way, the guns, as that’s an integral part of the gameplay, and just the ever-evolving story that continues to answer questions we’ve been asking since the first game.
Borderlands is unfortunately a franchise that hasn’t been consistent throughout all its games and has recently hit a roadblock. It seems like with this film, Eli Roth decided to take inspiration from all the bad games within the franchise because, if that was his goal, he succeeded. When Eli Roth was attached to the project in 2020, he also had Craig Mazin alongside him to write a script, a script that was said to be really good. Eli Roth, a director known for his gore, and Craig Mazin, a writer known for writing compelling stories with well-written character development, it sounds like a recipe for a good film, but for unfortunate reasons, the script had been rewritten by Juel Taylor and Tony Rettenmaier, and once again by Eli Roth, totalling three completely different scripts during the pre-production for this film.
That is one of the major reasons for why this film ultimately doesn’t work. Eli Roth simply doesn’t show any care for the franchise that he’s adapting or even for the sci-fi genre. The film starts off by showing us Roland rescuing Tina, who in the film is the daughter of Atlas, the president of the Atlas Corporation. Within the first ten minutes, there are already major changes to the characters, and that’s not the only change they brought to Tiny Tina, a character who is simple to her core in the game but also a fan favourite for just how insane but loveable she is. It’s never overcomplicated; she’s a crazy little girl who doesn’t have family and finds one; it’s heartwarming, but all of that is thrown out of the window. Another major issue is that Roth decides to use the idea of vault hunters as one big joke in this film, with Lilith constantly reminding the audience that she isn’t a vault hunter in this film and that instead she’s a bounty hunter. Roland doesn’t have a close emotional connection with Tiny Tina. It’s genuinely all over the place and the messiest film of the year.
Cate Blanchett signed on originally when Craig Mazin was still writing, and with the changes made, she had to suffer alongside them. There is only so much an actor can do for a bad script, and Cate Blanchett and Ariana Greenblatt truly try their best with a script that provides lines such as “You and what army?”. When it comes to the other characters, there’s not much that can be said. Kevin Hart feels like a miscast with Roland, and the same can be said for Cate Blanchett as Lilith, but she still somehow makes it work. Kevin Hart as Roland simply feels like Kevin Hart playing his role in Jumanji, but trying to make an attempt at being serious wasn’t fun to watch. Claptrap feels like his character from the games; he’s annoying and can sometimes be funny, but a lot of the jokes don’t really land, and most of the humour comes from when it sounds like he’s making a mockery of the film itself. Jack Black does a good job of playing an annoying Claptrap, to the point where I want the film to just be over and done with.
Eli Roth mentions several sci-fi films as inspiration, such as Star Wars and Escape from New York, yet it isn’t evident what aspects of those films make their way into Borderlands. Borderlands is a very visually appealing game; it’s striking, it’s colourful, and it’s full of life. Roth manages to do the opposite here; with restrictions on the film being PG-13 in the US and 12A in the UK, the jokes can never reach the heights that they are meant to reach. The film seemingly also wants to have the visual flair that James Gunn provides with his films such as Guardians of the Galaxy and The Suicide Squad, but no matter how hard Roth tried, the film still ended up feeling lifeless without any character. The only positive about the look of the film is that it wasn’t void of colour.
It’s hard to tell if any of this film was genuinely filmed on location or if it was all in the studio using built-in sets and green screens. The composition for 90% of the movie looked bad; it’s already hard to believe with a sci-fi movie that these characters are on another planet, and there’s no attempt here to even make it look like they’re outside here on Earth filming. A lot of the cast didn’t mesh well with the backgrounds or just the general scenery that they were working with. Tina’s introduction as Tiny Tina when Lilith finds her is a perfect example of how nothing on the screen looks real; it’s surprising that Claptrap was able to look consistently good.
The film comes with a warning before it begins, telling you about the use of flashing lights for anyone who may have epilepsy. It’s nice to see these warnings before films, and I’m glad they were in front of this film because the excessive use of flashes and white lights was absurd. There were genuine moments where I almost fell asleep because of how dull and boring this film was, but with a flash every second, there was no way Eli Roth was going to let me fall asleep. It’s like it was designed as a method to hypnotise people so that they’d keep watching.
Borderlands is one of the worst films to release this year and is an insult to all good video game adaptations that at least try to put in the effort of honouring the game that they’re adapting. The script is poor with performances to fit alongside it aside from Cate Blanchett, Ariana Greenblatt, and Jack Black. The only way to even tell it’s still a Borderlands film is by its score, which is the only respectful aspect of this atrocity of a film.
Borderlands releases in theatres on August 9.
