Borderlands Review

Audiences are in a golden age of video game adaptations with The Super Mario Bros Movie pleasing fans, whilst The Last of Us and Fallout were critical hits on TV. Borderlands shows that video game adaptations are still tricky beasts to tame.

Pandora is a planet with a legendary vault that was created by an extinct alien race. This planet draws in every corporation, mercenary, and psychopath, making it a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Lilith (Cate Blanchett) is a bounty hunter who was born in Pandora and is hired by the president of the Atlas corporation (Edgar Ramírez), whose daughter, Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) has been abducted and taken to Pandora. Lilith ends up teaming up with a team of misfits who set out to find the vault before The Atlas Corporation does.

Borderlands has been a troubled production. Filming started in 2021 under Eli Roth, but reshoots were conducted in 2023. Roth ended up shooting Thanksgiving in 2023, which led to Tim Miller, the director of Deadpool and Terminator: Dark Fate handling the reshoots. Greenblatt stated she was 13 when she started working on the film. There has been controversy involving the writing credit since one of them was a pseudonym, Joe Crombie, which led to Craig Mazan (Chernobyl and The Last of Us) issuing a denial. IMDB has linked Joe Crombie to the novelist Joe Abercrombie, but that’s due to the names having a slight similarity. The film has been kicked mercilessly by critics, holding a 10% score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Fans of the game have been hostile to the film since the release of the first trailer. They complained that the casting was wrong with the actors looking like they were cosplayers. It was certainly a weird choice to have Kevin Hart, a standup comedian known for being short as a straight-lace military officer. The casting director’s job seemed to be to hire the biggest-name actors they could find regardless of whether they fit a role.

The Borderlands movie had major problems: being derivative and obnoxious. The filmmakers and producers were attempting to make a Guardians of the Galaxy style film where it was a cooky set of misfits being forced together on a quest. The Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy was a collection of fun films that had characters bouncing off each other, great action and special effects, and genuinely emotional moments. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 was enough to put anyone through the emotional wringer. Borderlands lacked the heart and humour of James Gunn’s movies. Tina and Claptrap (Jack Black) were a couple of the most annoying characters recently put to film. I sympathised with Lilith shooting and torturing the robot.

The world of Borderlands came off as a mix match of other properties. Pandora was a planet-wide version of the Mad Max series, the planet’s name reminded me of Avatar, the plot was a mix of Indiana Jones and Ready Player One, and Lilith was a Han Solo-style character. The planet where Lilith was recruited looked like a generic cyberpunk world. Some issues were not entirely Borderlands’ fault since the game came out in 2009 and Avatar and Ready Player One, but those comparisons still came to mind.

Borderlands felt it was butchered in the editing. The runtime was 102 minutes, but due to the credits five to ten minutes could be cut out. Borderlands had a thin plot where the characters go from place to place like it was based on a video game. Any character development and wider mythology were cut down to the minimum. It was hard to take the mythology about an ancient alien race seriously when the film was so tonally silly.

There was an attempt at sincerity due to the relationship between Lilith and Tina. This was due to Tina’s tragic backstory. However, when there was a flashback that was meant to be an important emotional reveal it brought back memories of another notorious 2024 movie, Madame Web.

As an action film, Borderlands was lacklustre. There was nothing particularly remarkable about the sci-fi chases and shootouts. A sequence in a mining facility was decent, but it was mostly in corridors making it feel more like a TV series than a cinematic release. Roth wanted to make an R-rated film but the studio toned down the violence. It was most obvious when destructive industrial waste was meant to rain down on a load of Psychos. It was a strange decision considering Roth comes from a horror background, and Miller was known for making violent action films. Gearbox and 2K acted as production companies, so they should know their games were cartoonishly violent. It seemed like someone wanted to market the film to a younger audience to attract new players, but the more successful video game adaptations respect the source material and the fanbase.

Borderlands was a thin film that lacked any thrills or spectacle and made some of the biggest mistakes that other video game adaptations have made.