An uninspired plot and several phoned in performances makes Borderlands a huge misfire.
Adapting a story from one medium to another is tough. Whether the source material is a novel or a comic or a twitter thread or a game, there are many choices that need to made because while all these formats are valid, they’re also not the same, and stories need to be adapted to their new medium.
Video games often face the most difficult version of this because in many cases the character is an avatar for the player, and redefining that character can lead to incongruities. More importantly though, it can lead to a let down in another area: expectations.
There’s no denying in 2024 that video games are art, or how popular they are. The Borderlands franchise has sold over 75 million copies total of its several titles. People love it, and with that love comes expectations that can be nearly impossible to overcome even when filmmakers are putting their all into adapting these stories. Not all game to movie adaptations are going to be great -and debatably most of them aren’t- but the important thing is that the people making film have respect for the source material, and make good adaptational choices while they’re making it.
It’s a shame, then, that the people making the Borderlands movie don’t do any of this, and instead of making any interesting choices they opt to simply transplant the aesthetics of the game onto a standard quest story you have definitely seen a thousand times before.
Cate Blanchett plays Lilith, a bounty hunter with a chip on her shoulder. She is contracted by Atlas (Edgar Ramirez) to find his daughter Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) on the planet Pandora. Pandora is both the most important planet in the cosmos, the seat of power of an extinct alien race that left remnants of their technology behind, and also a garbage dump. Along the way we also meet Roland, a mercenary played by Kevin Hart, Tannis, a giant mask-wearing bulletproof psycho called Krieg played by Florian Munteanu, and a manic one-wheeled robot called Claptrap who is voiced by Jack Black.
It’s not worth explaining any of these characters because they’re all the most basic of archetypes. Lilith has a complicated back story with a parent who sent her away to protect her. Tiny is sweet-looking and foul-mouthed. Claptrap is boastful and cowardly. There are effectively no new ideas here, and worse yet, anything actually interesting about these characters from the games is stopped away, along with just about anything else that would make the location and story feel unique.
The only performer in the whole movie that seems to really understand the movie they’re in is Jack Black, whose voice work hits just the right note of upbeat and doomsaying, and what few laughs the movie has are his. Everyone else is giving either way too much or not at all enough, and one characters dialogue is so obviously recorded in post as to be off putting.
Not even wide and endless array of guns, one of the games core mechanics and unique features, makes it into the movie outside of a few casual lines of dialogue. It’s frustrating because the Borderlands universe is one that could contain any story, and in fact would be a great setting for something new and interesting and separate from the games narrative -a set up Fallout knocked it out of the park with earlier this year- but instead we get a story that if you can’t guess the end after the first fifteen minutes, then you’re probably not paying attention.
Some of this would be excusable if the film looked good at least; Borderlands has always had a distinct aesthetic, but the cell-shaded look does not translate and all the effects -digital and physical alike- are inconsistent, trapping the film in a weird uncanny valley where everything looks expensive and cheap at the same time.
Borderlands is a frustrating film. With so much wasted potential, and so much wasted talent involved, how could it not be? The film is the laziest type of adaptation, one where the filmmakers have only gleaned the most surface-level aspects of the source material and then transplanted them without any of the depth that makes the games likable. Borderlands perhaps isn’t then deepest of wells, but even a mud puddle has a bottom and there’s no excuse to not even try to find it.
Borderlands will be in theaters on August 9, 2024.
Learn more about the film, including how to buy tickets, at the title’s official website.
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