Should Have Stayed Locked in the Vault

Note: This article is a discussion of how well the 2024 Borderlands film adapts the elements of the video game series to the big screen. If you don’t know the game series, or you want to somehow go into that film completely unspoiled, then go read our main review. And while you’re at it, skip the film because it’s just plain bad.

When it comes to adapting material into films, a balance has to be struck between fidelity to the source and making things work on the screen. Whether it’s a book, a comic, a video game, board game, or whatever else you can think of, one kind of media does not naturally translate into another no matter how hard you try to crowbar it. You have to make cuts, and adjustments, and changes, just for the sake of creating something that works on the big screen. This is an accepted fact and, as a reviewer, I always know this going into a film. Changes happen, it’s a fact of the process.

Somehow, though, despite knowing this, I was caught off guard by just how much the Borderlands film changes the source material of the game series. These aren’t changes made to suit a different medium. These changes are there because Hollywood felt they knew better than the game companies behind 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. (Gearbox and 2K) and that people wouldn’t want to watch something that hewed too closely to the source material. Lionsgate wanted a generic superhero film and they used the bits and bobs of Borderlands to make it happen. The resulting film isn’t just bad from a continuity perspective, it’s a bad film all around.

Watching the film, I had to wonder just who this movie was for. It was clearly not a very good movie, so general audiences weren’t going to show up. But if it was for the fans then if needed to hew more closely to the source. Not perfectly close because there’s absolutely no way you can turn a first person shooter where all the main characters say generic lines as they kill people while the rest of the characters around them address these protagonists as if they were any generic hero into a proper film without some adjustments. The film did have to respect the continuity of the source material, though, and that, more than anything for me, is where this film absolutely fails. This is a movie that wears the Borderlands name but, in every single respect, doesn’t bother with any of the details of the game series.

Let’s start with the heroes. If you wanted to adapt the first game of the series, which this film kind of does, then that gives you four heroes to play with: Lilith, Roland, Mordechai, and Brick. The film only uses two, Roland and Lilith, and neither of them really feel like the heroes they’re playing. Roland here is a stoic and generic soldier who isn’t a leader, doesn’t really have any personality, and, worst of all, doesn’t even have his robotic turret that is the key thing that made his playable character interesting in the first game. Meanwhile, Lilith, the sassy and sarcastic character in the games with magical powers from the Eridian, is neither sassy nor sarcastic in this film and doesn’t even have her Siren powers until the movie is basically over. These characters do not function that they did in the games.

The reason why these people are on Pandora, the main planet of the game series as well as this movie, is because they’re searching for a vault that holds the lost technology and treasures of the Eridian alien race. They come to the planet because they’re special, with powers suited to taking out any threats as they go “vault hunting”. By removing those powers from these characters, you make them less interesting, less special. The characters in the film has less personality than their counterparts in the movie and, without their special abilities, there’s not even any reason to care about their action.

The rest of the cast of main characters isn’t really better. Tiny Tina, as played by Ariana Greenblatt, barely resembles her character from the game. She’s short, and likes explosives, but that’s about it. Her manic personality is gone, as is her fun way of talking. This game takes the breakout character of Borderlands 2, the character so good they not only gave her one of the best expansions for that game but her own spin-off as well, and they turn her into a generic kid sidekick. Hell, they even change her back story, removing the fact that she saw her own parents get killed by bandits which, in turn, warped her mind into the psycho killer she is. This character, in short, is not Tiny Tina.

Tannis is also here, in name only, as played by Jamie Lee Curtis. Tanis in the games is a lot like Tina, a person that has been stuck on Pandora for years and went rather quietly insane. She has rambling rants about the ravages of man and then suddenly talks about her two roommates (which were a couple of wooden chairs that she believed had life) or how she slowly watched an assistant die simply because the other woman annoyed her. None of that is translated into the film, with Tannis instead being just a generic scientist who mumbles and occasionally acts detached from her emotions. You could have named this character anything other than “Tanis” and it wouldn’t change anything in the film at all, that’s how much they’ve watered her down here.

And then there’s Claptrap, the annoying robot from the video games who is somehow even more annoying here. For whatever reason, the film decides that we need to have Claptrap everywhere, this despite the games knowing clearly that Claptrap is best used in small doses. Claptrap’s whole job in the films is to open doors, spout exposition, and then get picked on. None of that happens in the film. Instead the character, as voiced by Jack Black in probably his worst voice performance ever, follows everyone around the whole damn movie, doing nothing except filling every single bit of air with his annoying voice. The character, introduced as Lilith’s first companion, should be key to some pivotal moment of the film since he’s there through all of it but, no, he does nothing, adds nothing, and actively detracts from the experience.

Honestly, this film really doesn’t need most of its characters. Roland, Tanis, and Claptrap are so incidental to the whole story that all three of them could be removed and absolutely nothing would have changed at all. Tina could have been saved by Kreig (since that’s basically what happens in the film anyway), the two could be on Pandora when Lilith arrives, and the trio could then drive around, avoiding Atlas goons, until they get to the final set piece. No one else is there except to spread around exposition so it comes from different mouths. When that’s the whole reason a character exists, they shouldn’t be there at all.

In fact, the only character I actually liked was Kreig. He was the psycho added to the second game as a bonus later in its run, and he’s there to spout nonsensical lines at the top of his voice, all while killing dudes with a buzzsaw axe. He’s a simple character and they managed to translate that perfectly to the screen. Sure, the implied internal monologue for Kreig, as seen in his expansion trailer, is missing here, but at this point, with everything the film fucks up, I’ll take what I can get.

There are plenty of other things we can point to as changes made simply for the sake of the writer/director Eli Roth not paying attention or simply not caring about fidelity. One of the villains is Knoxx, a female Commander who chase after the heroes on their way to the vault. Knoxx in the games is a General, not a Commander, and is also an older, put upon guy that hates the Atlas corporation and all it stands for. If they wanted a female character true to the Atlas cause, they should have gone with Commander Steele, who was literally the villain of the first film, chasing after the heroes as they made their way to the vault. This change of character name makes no sense.

Similarly, there are locations in this game that don’t feel like they should. In the second game the Caustic Caverns exist under the old location of Sanctuary, and it’s a massive, deep well of acidic waters and horrible monsters. In the game it’s nowhere near Sanctuary City, and basically exists as two small sewer tunnels that lead to the Bloodshot Stronghold. That, too, looks nothing like it should, nor do the Bloodshot existing within it. Hell, even Sanctuary doesn’t look like it should, being a strange set of streets that far closer resemble Knowhere from Guardians of the Galaxy than anything seen in the games (once again reinforcing the idea that Lionsgate really just wanted their own Guardians of the Galaxy film).

The biggest, and dumbest, change though is the story. We’re told that Tina was genetically engineered to be a key to unlock the vault (this is told to us early in the film so it’s not really a spoiler). She’s the daughter of Atlas, genetically, but she wants nothing to do with him. She’s special, though, and everyone needs her. Functionally we already have a character, and a villain, just like this: Angel. That character was originally thought to be an A.I. in the first film before being revealed to be a Siren under the control of Hyperion and her father, Handsome Jack. This movie basically does the Angel and Jack storyline, just without Tina being a Siren, or Atlas being as interesting as Jack, or anything else that would actually connect it to the story. It’s like Roth figured, “hey, everyone likes Tina so let’s write her a story where she’s the key,” and didn’t even realize what he wrote was a much worse version of the story of the first two games.

At every turn this film is just confounding. You couldn’t have made a worse version of this film if you tried. All you’d have to do is look at the games, see what they did, and just do that but, instead Roth and his crew did the exact opposite.

Hell, even the action doesn’t feel like it should .The games are known for their over-the-top guns and bright, colorful shooting. None of that is here, with not a single stupidly elaborate SMG or rifle, no elemental bullets, no fun, special powers. The shooting is generic in its guns and bullets, but it’s also just tired and boring. I’m not asking for the director to shoot everything in first person, but having some colorful guns shot at guys in a cohesive and competent way, would have done the trick. Just something to let me have any joy from this action at all.

As a fan of this series there is absolutely nothing to like about the Borderlands film. It changes everything it can to barely resemble the games it’s based on. If you love the games you’ll find nothing to enjoy from this film. This should have been a movie designed, at the very least, to give the fans something of what they enjoyed. Instead you could have changed the name of the film and that’s all it would have taken to not make it a Borderlands adaptation. It’s the farthest thing you could get from the source material short of simply writing something wholly original instead. I have no clue what Roth, his crew, or Lionsgate were thinking, but it’s pretty clear they didn’t want to make a Borderlands film considering how this movie actually turned out.