Borderlands

Image credit: impawards.com

Cinema is supported by a number of foundations: the sturdiest being the adaptation. Most of cinema’s bulk, and shape, and heft is made up of adaptations. They have started and sometimes ended entire careers. Heck, they have even spawned and reared major motion picture studios! And like any core pillar, the phenomenon of adaptations has splintered into beams that help support and widen the reach of cinema, adding to its mighty girth.

Obviously, adaptations of books and traditional oral stories have been inspiring and reshaping cinema for over a century, but as humanity has concocted new ways to tell stories and entertain itself, new subgenres of adaptations have appeared. The subject of today’s film review falls into one such subgenre: the videogame adaptation.

Videogame adaptations are not necessarily new, but they are certainly rising to prominence in a rather quick and feverish fashion. Within the last 5 years alone we have seen a solid number of movies and TV shows spawned from the videogame genre: Fallout, The Last of Us, The SuperMario Bros Movie, Five Nights At Freddy’s, and it has been confirmed that Alien: Romulus has been inspired by the videogame Alien: Isolation. This week, I treated myself to a solo night out for dinner and a movie and went and saw the newest addition to this list: Borderlands.

On the wasteland planet of Pandora there is a vault that is said to contain technologies from an alien race known as the Eridians. Vault hunters have been after this treasure for years, but no one has ever gotten close to finding it, let alone opening it. Until now. When the CEO of the Atlas Corporation hires cynical and bad-tempered bounty hunter Lilith (Cate Blanchett) to rescue his kidnapped daughter, it seems like an easy cheque. Until Lilith discovers that Atlas’ ‘daughter’ is actually a clone that he engineered to be the key to opening the Eridian Vault and her return to Atlas would very likely be her end. Lilith joins the ragtag team protecting Tiny Tina from Atlas, aiming to get to the Vault first and give Tina the upper hand against him.

This movie has been universally panned by critics and gamers alike, apparently hosting a myriad of ailments including being a mashup of various game narratives, an oppressive lack of narrative and character development, a terrible botching of beloved characters, and an overall attempt to be like Mad Max meets Guardians of the Galaxy and failing miserably. I agree that the movie suffers from all these things. I also agree with Jamie Tram in their ABC review of the film: “Borderlands is competent enough to simply be forgettable.”

Let me clarify that I do not consider myself a gamer, though I do play videogames, and I have never played any of the Borderlands games or knew anything about them when entering the cinema on Wednesday night. I review this movie simply as a movie. I walked in expecting garbage, but I was pleasantly presented with hot garbage -thanks to the ethereal luminescence of Cate Blanchett- and I honestly had a fun time by myself watching this film.

I agree that the writing is definitely where the film falls flat on its face, but honestly I’m inclined to chalk that to the fact that this film was in Development Hell since 2015 so by the time actual filming and production rolled around, everyone had already given up. Do you remember that trick of removing a stick of gum from the wrapper and then folding the wrapper again so that it still looked like it contained gum? That’s this movie. It’s got a very shiny and enticing wrapper that holds the promise of sweetness or minty freshness within, but it’s just empty. The story is very predictable, even for people who wander in completely oblivious to the source material, and there is no real camaraderie between the characters so it’s very hard to form any sort of emotional investment in them. At one point there is a semi-interesting theme of maternalism that gets minutely explored, but it doesn’t really go anywhere so that fascination is short-lived.

Image credit: gamespot.com

All the cast did a fine job. I could honestly watch Cate Blanchett all day and, to be fair, it did look like she was having a rather fun time so I can get behind that. Jack black as the robot Claptrap was cutely sarcastic, Jamie Lee Curtis as researcher Tannis was quite entertaining to watch, Ariana Greenblatt, while no Ashley Birch, did a solid job of Tiny Tina, and Kevin Hart is there too.

Visually, the film is kinda cool. The dystopian wasteland of Pandora, while nothing we haven’t already seen, is still a good setting for the various forms of violence that flavour the film, and the space-age trinkets and technologies still provide some fun novelty.

Can Borderlands be considered cinematic art? Absolutely not. Could things have been better? 100%. But at the end of the day, I still had a nice time out watching this movie: I chuckled a few times, my mind did not wander to other things, and I left the cinema feeling that I had not wasted my time.

Director: Eli Roth, 2024

Cast: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Ariana Greenblatt, Jack Black, Florian Munteanu, Janina Gavankar, Gina Hershon, Hayley Bennett, Edgar Ramirez, & Jamie Lee Curtis.