Borderlands: Time To Let The Wicked Rest
Borderlands is barely a movie. It’s borderline unwatchable. It does make a convincing argument that video game movies should stop existing altogether. We’ve made admirable efforts for 30 years, but Eli Roth has made something that’s such an incoherent waste of money that it should simply be the end of an entire genre. A film with no audience, no energy, no purpose, and no interest in its source material. A film that managed to find its way into theaters despite the production’s best efforts to fail catastrophically at every turn. A film doomed from the start - like the rest of its genre - an IP recognition cash in written by a board room and directed by focus groups. As enticing as it is to see the aesthetics and rich world building of a video game on the silver screen, it turns out that a medium designed to be an immersive, interactive experience that directly creates a personal investment with the material is best left that way.
The existence and success of Borderlands as a video game franchise is both something of a miracle and also almost entirely predicated on a gameplay loop that is disconnected from all narrative aspirations, which is difficult to adapt into a movie. What has now become a recognizable genre – the ‘looter shooter’ – was once a simple plan to mash together shooters like Duke Nukem and dungeon crawling RPGs like Diablo by introducing a satisfying system of loot generation that would encourage exploration and questing in order to optimize your build. The game was developed with the typical aughts aesthetic of washed out, muddy grunge realism with no personality until very late in development, when it was completely overhauled and given a cartoony, colorful, cel-shaded look. In turn, the systems were revamped to lean more heavily into the exaggerated fantasy, and the game became a huge hit.
Borderlands was a revelation because there was nothing else like it – but the key was the gameplay. Snappy and satisfying gunplay with an infinite loop of RPG looting to keep you searching far and wide for the best weapons (of which the game boasted millions, thanks to its generative loot system that made every drop unique). The desert landscape of Pandora was teeming with personality, packed with memorable characters and interesting lore that filled in the gaps where the story fell flat. Borderlands 2 expanded on the locales and the roster of characters while leaning even more heavily into the cartoonish madness, enhancing the loot system and creating a more compelling narrative centered around a villain so iconic that the franchise never quite seemed to escape him. It’s also built to be endlessly replayable, with playthroughs that escalate in difficulty as you slowly max out your build and easily farmable bosses that allowed you to hunt down all the most powerful loot. The narrative becomes such familiar background noise that most fans know every detail by heart.
Through all the franchise’s history, through every spinoff and dip in quality, there remained certain quirks and comforts that came with every Borderlands experience. Wasteland weapons dealer Marcus introduced every game like a chapter in a storybook – even trying to skip past cutscenes on a new playthrough, you could never escape the calling card of “So, you want to hear another story, eh?” The games all follow up these grandiose hand-drawn introduction animations with flashy character intros set to pop music (Cage the Elephant’s “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” became intrinsically linked to the franchise). You’re dropped into the game in a daze, another vault hunter in search of treasure, and the story slowly develops around you. It's important to point out all of the idiosyncrasies and unique selling points of Borderlands because it’s genuinely impressive how hard the film tries to completely ignore all of them.
It's not important to list out individually where the film deviates from its source material and fails catastrophically because that’s the entire film. You can point at any one thing and say it’s where it all went wrong and you’d partially be right – but it would also imply that there was ever anything here that would have been coherent and watchable, and it’s hard to find any evidence of that in the lifeless 100 minutes this movie makes you suffer through. Sure, the casting makes no sense; Cate Blanchett is probably 30 years older than her character should be (which the movie solves by just pointing out that she’s old a bunch), Jamie Lee Curtis seems to have absolutely no idea what she’s doing, famously short comedian Kevin Hart plays a famously tall no nonsense military commander. This is frustrating but miscasting for star power isn’t really a surprise from a studio blockbuster. It’s just emblematic of the fact that nobody is trying.
Down to the last detail, Borderlands bastardizes every piece of its source material, frequently actively spitting in the face of it. Every concession it makes for the sake of cinematic storytelling strips all personality from the world and the characters until it’s just meaningless, unrecognizable sludge. The world of Pandora is reduced to buzzwords of notable locations that would be meaningless to unfamiliar audiences and is just agonizing to anyone else (Tannis explains at length the unique properties of the Caustic Caverns and their crystal formations, only for the entirety of the Caustic Caverns to be shown as a single sewer tunnel with some acrid fluid running through it). The action is scarce and unwatchable when it appears, the guns might as well be nonexistent despite being a massive cornerstone of the franchise, and every scene appears more lazily slapped together than the last until a Muse song plays diegetically and a can of AXE body spray is displayed prominently in the middle of a scene. So why bother? Why do we continue wasting so much time and energy on asking for blockbuster video game adaptations when their very nature demands they be watered down and reconfigured by algorithms and marketability until nothing worthwhile is left? So let’s just be done. We’ve hit rock bottom. The only positive spin to be placed on this abhorrent disaster of a movie is that it’s such a massive flop that it’s entirely feasible this really is the end.
