Alright folks, let’s get this one over with.
It is, with microscopic-to-the-point-of-effectively-non-existent exception, an unhealthy practice to pass a final judgment on a film before you’ve actually seen it yourself. Indeed, you can scour the social media anecdotes, rage-tubers, Rotten Tomatoes scores, and trailers, but you never truly have a definitive line on a film until you’ve taken it in firsthand.
And yet, in the many months leading up to Borderlands, there was never any question that this film was going to be a complete and utter washout. Everywhere you looked, a piece of strained dialogue or impossibly wooden stylization promised a piece of shoddy IP filmmaking of the lowest pedigree.
That promise was kept, of course, with Borderlands going down as the latest and one of the most severe misfires by Eli Roth, who we know possesses a filmmaking talent that’s as capable as it is irregular; a talent that had its most recent time in the sun courtesy of Thanksgiving.
And it’s precisely because Roth is a proven talent who happens to have a list of woeful stinkers to his name, that the tragedy of Borderlands becomes apparent to those looking a bit deeper. Was this a complete and utter act of artistic dissonance from everyone involved, or was this film genuinely aiming for something more erudite than a popcorn movie? Either way, it falls flat on its face, but the case it makes for being even a shadow of the latter renders it — somehow, someway — not completely toothless.
The film stars Cate Blanchett as Lilith, an intergalactic outlaw who’s called back to her home planet of Pandora — a filthy, take-no-prisoners wasteland — when adventure quite aggressively calls her name against her will. Along the way, she teams up with rogue soldier Roland (Kevin Hart), bloodthirsty teenager Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), Tina’s protector Krieg (Florian Munteanu), irritating robot Claptrap (Jack Black), and eccentric researcher Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis) as they make a beeline for the treasure hidden in Pandora’s vault, all while dodging the clutches of corporate boss Atlas (Edgar Ramírez), who wants the treasure for himself.
Know this above all; if you plan on watching or reading about this film with the intention of approaching it straight on, you will only waste your time. Similarly, it is not possible for a film critic, such as myself, to explain why Borderlands is a complete and utter failure as a straight viewing experience; not without wasting your time.
And I don’t want to waste your time, so here’s all you need to know about Borderlands as a straight viewing experience; it is insultingly inept at every creative hurdle. The plotting, characterization, direction, ideas, and set pieces of this movie — as a straight viewing experience — are all beneath the bottom of the barrel, and the actors cannot and do not do anything to try and salvage it.
With all that established, why do I keep saying “straight viewing experience?”
Well, it’s because Borderlands works best as a commentary on why video game adaptations had — and, on some rapidly diminishing level, continue to have — such a rancid reputation. The first half hour, in fact, actually does a relatively fantastic job of playing with this identity.
When we’re first introduced to Blanchett’s Lilith, she’s a no-nonsense bounty hunter just looking to do her job. She a crack shot who moves about the battlefield intelligently, and she has absolutely no time for sentiment, exposition, or Claptrap’s quirky dialogue; all she wants is to complete her objective. In other words, Lilith is a gamer.
And this right here reflects the core issue that has plagued video game film adaptations for so long. Games are built on mechanics, gameplay systems, and tensions that — reductively speaking — require unique give-and-take interactions to keep that game-specific organism flowing. This organism requires no emotional engagement, and in fact, thrives without it.
Because of this, games do not and cannot tell stories the way that movies and television shows do, because the mindset that comes with absorbing a good film’s theme and plot is much different from that which engages with the gameplay of a good game, and these two mindsets have a tendency to clash.
And Borderlands plays itself exactly as a gameplay-centric gamer might regard one of the Borderlands games. This player (Lilith) knows that they’re not going to extrapolate any truly thoughtful meaning or emotion from this narrative/adventure because video game narratives are rooted in plot beats and genre set dressing that chiefly manifest as problems that the player must solve through tension-based gameplay (which is different than simply interacting with the game with a controller or keyboard). It’s no wonder, then, that Lilith hurries blankly through almost every interaction as she attempts to get to the next challenge; she’s bored, she wants to play, she wants to win.
The cherry on top? The bulk of Lilith’s early intimate moments are with Tina, a member of the Eridian race who we’re told is a crucial part of the vault’s puzzle. Another way of saying that is that the only person Lilith cares about at first, is the MacGuffin. Indeed, Tina pertains to the objective, and it is stupendously easy to read that as the only reason that Lilith (who, again, is our gamer on a quest) is capable of caring about her. Without question, the meta seeds that are planted here are packed with potential.
Unfortunately, that potential is squandered pretty resolutely. It cuts away from Lilith too often to maintain that meta-identity, and by the time we’re introduced to Tannis, Lilith gets too emotionally involved as a character for this particular, idiosyncratic edge to keep its shape. Nevertheless, a metafiction reading remains without a shadow of a doubt the best way to engage with Borderlands, unless your goal is to fall asleep, groan, hate movies for the rest of your life, or some combination of the three.
The best-case scenario for Borderlands would be a version of it that fully leans into these stylings, but also subtextually centers the journey around learning to love both games and films in all their inharmoniousness. Right now, so many of us wish for video games to be regarded as art forms in the same way that film is, and yet so many of us have forgotten how to engage with games in a way that actually honors the medium’s foundations. The strength of a game’s artistic potential lies not in the emotion of a story (which gameplay, if it’s any good, will be at odds with), but in the depth and originality of its play (and the best games understand “play” as far more than just an endorphin farm).
Of course, we’re in 2024 now, meaning we have the likes of The Last of Us, Fallout, and Arcane to prove that video game properties are actually capable of playing host to great stories, but the triumph of these shows has nothing to do with their origins as games; they’re simply great shows. Borderlands, by contrast, had the opportunity to celebrate both games and film by cheekily pointing out how discordant the two mediums are when they each honor their strengths properly, and how deserving each medium is of limitless love and respect.
Instead, Borderlands came to us as the latest candidate for a Razzies sweep, and let’s just say it’s no dark horse.