Oh, for fuck’s sake. We’ve come too far for this commercialized cesspool of media exploitation. There’s not a lick of sense to “director” Eli Roth’s translation of the chaotic, colorful, and comically crude videogame franchise. There’s not a damn thing that crosses over from the game that’s worth preserving. This is looking into the abyss and being swallowed whole. This is death upon arrival. Box office poison made for no reason by people who ought to know better. A disaster of epic proportions but also such an empty, vacuous pit of nothingness that means fuck all.
Borderlands is thoroughly terrible. It looks awful, is edited badly, the acting is horribly directed, the videogame elements are eye roll inducing, the humor is below juvenile standards, and there’s not a second of worthwhile footage in it.
The total waste of Cate Blanchett and Jamie Lee Curtis is easier to swallow because being in Borderlands is the same as doing nothing at all. It’s a movie that has come out but essentially does not exist. There’s no there there but there’s also no movie there. It’s not a movie that feels like a movie. This is the fatalistic spiritual death of the videogame movie, of a certain era, come to pass. And nothing more.
Let’s unpack what Borderlands is. Long ago in the early aughts, developer Gearbox Software were porting the original Halo (2001) to the PC and utilized their working knowledge of that tightly written co-op design to create their own franchiseable gun game where the hook is more Diablo-esque. Guns become randomly generated loot and the fun is experimenting with a team who collects their own specialized firearms. The game is a victory in game trailer-making, distinctly using the song “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” as a central point of its marketing identity. The games were never all that, the glory faded in the second and for sure the third outing and the writing was always below even videogame standards which are low as hell. The only good Borderlands game is perhaps Tales From the Borderlands (2014), an adventure game from The Walking Dead (2012) school of Telltale game design. It was actually funny and tonally what the series probably intended to aim for, but couldn’t reach. And it wasn’t simply a randomly generated gun treadmill, there was a structure and a story there, instead of just a plot.
This is, unfortunately, an adaption of the mainline series. Which offers nothing at all to bring into the movie except some annoying characters, so all that has been translated are those annoying characters. There’s no story. No movement. This is filmmaking atrophying and turning into itself, art become inert and so dead inside that there’s no soul left to find.
During the very troubled shoot Eli Roth went off and improbably made his best movie, Thanksgiving (2023), a classically made seasonal slasher with some notable kills in it. The difference between the products is stark. One is a passion project connected to the cinematic trademark of the off-season horror tradition and the other is the absolute detritus of the videogame-to-movie pipeline, and a good reason to never make movies this way again.