A Planetary Wasteland

Note: This review covers the movie Borderlands without getting into all the nitty gritty comparing the film to the continuity of the game series it’s based on. Our review looking at it via the lens of a fan of the series will be posted later.

As someone into the BorderlandsConceptually, Borderlands is Mad Max but set on an alien planet, with magic. The game play might be action-shooter-RPG fare, with a bit of Diablo thrown in, but the aesthetic is pure, Australian post-apocalyptic exploitation. series, I was immediately turned off by the first trailer for this film. This wasn’t because of any changes the film clearly made to the continuity of the video game series (which we’ll address later) but simply because the trailer for the film made the series look terrible. Whether you know the game series or not, the trailer boiled everything down to a generic, lame, not very action-y adventure of a bunch of less-than-funny people. It had none of the spark or joy of the games in its two minutes or so of footage. Yes, sure, it changed a lot of things, too, but that wasn’t what bothered me. End of the day, the trailer just looked stupid.

The thing about a trailer is that it’s supposed to get you hyped for the movie to come. This was, for most people, the first exposure they’d ever have to Borderlands. If you weren’t a gamer, and if you weren’t into shooters especially, then you likely didn’t know or didn’t care about these games. Hell, plenty of reviewers online have stated they don’t know the games and can’t speak about how well the film compares to the games. That’s fine, but it shows that even the people plugged in, who should be taking a moment to get invested (online, internet nerds) don’t have the knowledge base to appreciate the series like a fan. If that’s the audience you’re selling to, you have to knock it out of the park.

Credit where it’s due, the trailer perfectly illustrates just what the Borderlands movie was going to look like. Unfortunately, what it sold us was a terrible film and, well, having now watched the movie, I can attest that the trailer was accurate. This is one of the least interesting, least amusing, boring and bland films I’ve ever seen. Yes, sure, it has very little connection to the video games aside from some planet and character names, but the biggest issue is that, whether you know the games or not, this film is just now an enjoyable experience, start to finish.

The film opens with Roland (Kevin Hart) breaking into a secure Atlas facility floating above the planet Pandora. There he breaks into the prison wing and saves Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), pulling her off the ship with the help of psycho marauder Kreig (Florian Munteanu). Together they make for the planet below to lay low and try to escape the forces of Atlas (both a company as well as the name of the company’s president, played by Edgar Ramírez), the Crimson Raiders, led by Commander Knoxx (Janina Gavankar).

To get Tina back, Atlas hires a bounty hunter, Lilith (Cate Blanchett), who was born on Pandora before escaping many, many years ago. Lilith has absolutely no desire to return to Pandora, a blown out, wasteland of a planet ruled by murderers and marauders, but Atlas throws so much money at her that she’s unable to resist. Atlas needs Tina back because Tina is a “daughter of Eridian”, someone connected to the planet which, millenia before, was ruled over by the alien race the Eridians. They died off, but left all their powerful, glorious tech sealed away in a multi-dimensional vault, and with Tina Atlas could open the vault and get the tech. But once Lilith meets Tina and the crew, and learns all about them, she decides to switch sides and protect the girl. It’s a fight against an evil corporation for the fate of a girl… and an entire planet.

The issues with Borderlands are numerous and staggering, and they go beyond all the things the film changes in comparison to the games (which, again, we’ll get to later). It’s pretty apparent that Lionsgate Films had little interest in actually making a proper Borderlands adaptation. Instead, what they saw was people with superpowers (specifically Lilith) that they could take and mold into a group of heroes a la the Guardians of the Galaxy. This is a comparison I’ve seen multiple times online since the film came out and, yes, it seems pretty accurate. Lilith is Starlord (who doesn’t want to be a hero), Roland is Gamora (stoic and on a mission), Tiny is Rocket (violent and able to improvise weapons out of anything) and Krieg is Goot (saying random stuff that no one can understand). Lionsgate figured they could make their own superhero franchise (pulling double duty by also giving Lilith unlimited power, making her into Captain MarvelCaptain Marvel) and audiences would show up.

There are a few catches with this. First and foremost, the superhero boom has died off. We’re past the point where any superhero film can be made and released to a few hundred million in grosses. Hell, even the Captain Marvel sequel, The Marvels, crashed and burned at the Box Office after the first film made over a billion. Trying to release what is, in effect, a no-name brand as a superhero film in this current climate was a move that massively miscalculated what audiences were in for. The suits thought people wanted one thing, but no one checked with the audiences for that.

Still, it would have been possible for people to care if they at least showed up. If the film had been at all good, those that bought tickets could have spread word of mouth about the film. But the resulting movie, co-written and directed by Eli Roth doesn’t provide anything in the way of laughs, thrills, or emotions that could draw people in and make them care. This film, like many of the characters within it, is dead inside, start to finish. I don’t think you could have possibly made a worse film out of Borderlands if you’d actively tried.

To start, those characters I listed above, Lilith and Roland, Tina and Krieg, are nothing more than cliches. They aren’t real characters, they’re cardboard standups moved around the screen to do their jobs as the script dictates without ever actually engaging in any meaningful way. One character goes up to another, the exposition dump, some bad guy shows up to break up the conversation, and then generic shooting happens. Over and over this is all we get, but nothing that’s said or done actually works to the benefit of the characters. It’s all just so that the characters can move along a linear path to get to the end. The story is but an empty conveyor upon which the empty characters can move to the empty end.

Let’s take Tina. She’s a violent child who likes to blow things up. That’s the character we meet at the beginning, and that’s who she is by the end. She doesn’t have an arc, she’s simply there because the plot requires the kid as a kind of McGuffin. Roland had nothing to his character except the motivation to protect Tina (and we’re never told why). Krieg is the same, and we know even less about him by the time the film ends because he doesn’t have any dialogue that actually means anything. The worst offender, though, is Lilith, a character so clearly modeled on Star Lord that you expect her to break out into a song and dance number set to “Come and Get Your Love”.

Lilith dresses in leather, she hates being on Pandora, she doesn’t want to be a hero, and she also secretly has a connection to the planet that will motivate her to become a super-powered leader (and none of that should come as a spoiler because this film is so nakedly obvious about it, start to finish, that you probably will figure out the story from the second the opening narration begins). If the plotting of this movie didn’t begin with Lionsgate coming to Eli Roth with a set of superhero mad libs and saying, “we want this,” I’d be absolutely shocked.

All of this dilutes the film down to something far less interesting than the sum of its parts. Instead of introducing a bunch of interesting characters (and all of these characters could be interesting if they were in the right hands, with the right script) and letting the plot flow naturally, this film is set up with the ending obviously in mind so that the characters can all be dragged towards it. “By the end of the film we need Lilith to be a hero, the team together, and the planet ready to accept its guardians. That way we can grow a franchise out of it.” Well, the film goes through those motions, setting everything in the studio mandated place, but I really doubt a franchise will come to follow.

Even then, we might have still gotten a decently enjoyable (albeit cookie-cutter and dumb) film from the resulting mess if Roth had shown any indication he had a handle on this kind of material. Eli Roth is not the director I would have chosen for this film because he makes very basic, very dumb, very simple films. Usually they’re horror movies (which, if Borderlands were allowed to embrace its M rating material and go for a R-rating film, might have been cool) but they aren’t usually very deep or interesting. We’re talking Cabin Fever, Hostel, Knock Knock, and Thanksgiving, none of which are classics of their forms. Roth is a very basic, workmanlike director who can’t really handle comedy, or action, or special effects. The resulting Borderlands shows that all too well.

The film, for starters, is just not funny. You can argue about how good the humor is in the Borderlands games, but many of the jokes in those titles land (even if there are plenty of other lines that make you groan). There was not a single line or a single moment that made me even chuckle a little in Roth’s Borderlands. This is a tragic, tedious affair that seems to think having people get piss in their mouths, or get shot, or blow up is funny. Nothing said or done is actually humorous, but the film desperately wants you to laugh. It needs it, but never actually does the work to get good laughs from the material.

It’s surprising because all you would have had to do to make a funny script would be steal the jokes from the games themselves. Gearbox (who makes the games) and 2K (the publishing studio) were on board with this film and clearly they would have let the crew pillage whatever they needed (since so much of the basic material from the games is stolen and cobbled together into an ill-fitting mass for this movie). Just go in and steal jokes and repurpose them. The film makes none of the same jokes as the games, but then it also doesn’t make any real jokes at all. There is no humor to this supposedly humorous film.

Meanwhile, the action is also terrible. The Borderlands games are shooters, and if you watched any footage from any of the games, you could easily have found ways to borrow action ideas from that material. Instead, the shooting in this movie is the worst part of it. All of the action is bland, with no stakes and no thrill. We face a character, seeing them shoot, and then we cut to someone falling down. This happens over and over, shot and reverse shot, and that’s it for the action. There is no elaborate staging or interesting choreography. There are no single shots so we can see who the character is aiming at so we connect shot and target. Just shot and reverse shot over and over sucking all the fun out of it. I would have thought it impossible to screw up the action in a Borderlands film considering shooting is the whole point of the series but, well, Roth managed to do the impossible.

And, yes, this is also a bloodless affair. Borderlands is an M-rated game series and Lionsgate decided they wanted a PG-13 film, so all the fun blood and guts and everything else about the series is removed here, leading to a film that barely feels, in any way, shape, or form, like the video games that spawned it. Hell, were it not for the fact that the set design does nicely mirror the video games (this is the only aspect that the film gets right) this would barely even register as a Borderlands game at all. It feels about as connected to its source material as the 1993 Super Mario Bros. film felt to NintendoSince 1983 (with the release of the Famicom gaming system in Japan), Nintendo has proven to be a gaming company dedicated to finding what gamers want, even when the gamers don't know it themselves. From dual-screen systems, to motion controls, to convertible home console/portable consoles, Nintendo regularly proves that the weirdest innovation is exactly what the gaming community needs.’s original game series. It’s that bad.

Whatever Lionsgate wanted from Borderlands, they clearly got it. They managed to take this video game series and turn it into a generic superhero origin story with bad action, no humor, and absolutely no gore. It’s as painfully basic as you can get, all (in theory) to set up further sequels for the film. Considering that it cost upwards of $120 Mil to make and only made $15 Mil its opening weekend internationally (meaning it’ll make, probably, far less than $25 Mil total at the Box Office), Lionsgate’s franchise plans are dead in the water. They wanted a painfully generic superhero film and they got it, but it was so painful no one wanted to watch it at all).

Stay away from Borderlands. That’s not coming as a fan of the games (even if I am one) but as just a guy that had to sit through this excruciatingly bad film in the theater. Do yourself a favor and, no matter what, see anything else instead. Or, hell, just don’t see anything. Seeing nothing is still better than seeing Borderlands.