Ever wondered what happens when you get one of the most popular game franchises in the industry known for being unhinged and adult-oriented, throw it at a director who’s never interacted with the source material, and make it PG-13? You somehow outdo Madame Web as the most disappointing movie of 2024, producing a soulless shell that had a $115 million budget, but grossed only $30 million worldwide, and debuted with a 0% tomato rating on that one rating site.

We’re currently in a stage where Hollywood produces more high-cost low-quality movies than it does blockbusters. I blame it on companies making dumb financial decisions and avoiding artistic ones. The thing is, MOVIES ARE ART, so you won’t get very far if all you’re trying to do is turn a profit. There were plans to start a Borderlands cinematic universe and honestly, that’s free money. But those plans are dead now.

I intend to put down all the evidence, and figure out how exactly such a relatively well-written game franchise could possibly have an adaptation so bad. Not to say viewers haven’t seen this happen before (remember terrible live-action anime titles like Dragon Ball, and Netflix’s Death Note).
Adaptations can be good though. We know they can. Fallout, and The Last of Us (TLOU) are examples of near-perfect adaptations. Speaking of TLOU, one of the show’s writers, Craig Mazin, worked on Borderlands but has since hidden his real name from the project and frankly, I would too.

Adaptations can be good though. We know they can. Fallout, and The Last of Us (TLOU) are examples of near-perfect adaptations. Speaking of TLOU, one of the show’s writers, Craig Mazin, worked on Borderlands but has since hidden his real name from the project and frankly, I would too.

This “movie” is living proof that you could have great visuals, an expensive cast, “comedy”, gimmicks and easter eggs for fans of the original content, and still make a bad movie. Good movies have good writing, execution, and a general respect for viewers. It is non-negotiable. Thing is, Borderlands (the videogame), actually has really good writing. All the tools to succeed were right there yet the movie failed so spectacularly one would think it was on purpose. Mikey Neumann and the other original Borderlands writers deserve better.

Eli Roth, the director who put it all together, was a questionable choice for the production considering this was his first attempt at handling such a complex adaptation, and his public disinterest in the narrative that lives at the core of Borderlands.

He is known for his role as Donny “The Bear Jew” Donowitz in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009). Roth typically directs a lot of “splatter” horror with movies like Cabin Fever, and Hostel. His first movie away from torture horror was 2018’s, The House with a Clock in Its Walls, where he worked with Jack Black and Cate Blanchett, and decided to ask them to work on Borderlands. The movie has received mostly positive reviews from critics who largely praised the cast, but said the film did not fully live up to its potential. I think history repeated itself.

Eli Roth happens to also be a psychoanalyst, which is funny because Borderlands has many characters with interesting psychology, and the games dive into their minds (sometimes literally) to explain why they are the way they are. Yet somehow, none of this even vaguely made it into the production.

An awful trend common among bad sequels and adaptations is the director and cast avoiding the source material or at the very least, not having any interest in the experience that brought fans to the story in the first place. I know Eli Roth grew up with games on the Atari, but I’m not sure about his experience with the Borderlands games, because I doubt a fan of the game would be comfortable with how watered down the movie feels. His intentions to stray from the established world were pretty honest from the start, and I appreciate that considering some Star Wars productions, and Netflix’s Avatar: The last Airbender basically lied to audiences in order to get fans of the source to stay invested.

He wanted to make a fun sci-fi adventure movie with explosions and witty banter to entertain people of all ages, just funny cinema. As a result, the movie is constantly telling jokes that no one’s laughing at and playing with cliché tropes in the most disappointing ways. It doesn’t take itself seriously so the director suggests you “shut your brain off” before watching. I can’t speak for everyone but I feel insulted when that’s a requirement to enjoy the media. I don’t have to shut my brain off to enjoy SpongeBob SquarePants.

 In interviews he regularly mentioned wanting to make the movie its own thing that combines the likes of Star Wars, Mad Max, Escape from New York and the Fifth Element. I do see the similarities and I think a lot of them were good calls but he somehow got lost in trying to turn it into “its own thing” that it ironically ended up with no identity. Looks to me like he made his own movie with his own vision and slapped the Borderlands branding on top which is by definition false advertising. On top of that I don’t think it does a very good job even without the Borderlands impersonation. This brings us to…

None of the characters actually have chemistry (or relationships for that matter) outside tropes that serve the plot. The most emotional scene is Tina crying, but there is zero build up and a general lack of connection with the audience. It’s narratively uninteresting; the world is difficult to understand because they are introduced way too much and way too fast. They had an exposition-filled prologue that told the audience nothing. Why is Lilith a bounty hunter? Why does Atlas want the vault when no one knows what’s in the vault? Why does the team even do what they do? Why is anything the way it is? The only source is “Trust me bro”.

I may sound like just another extreme fan butt-hurt about creative liberties, but I assure you this movie is bad; not so bad that it’s genius. Just objectively bad. The characters and dialogue are the furthest from their source material they could have ever been. It’s as if you got random actors in cosplay who don’t know their characters. This is why a Henry Cavill is needed on set. Making videogame adaptations is difficult and risky, but Borderlands already does half the job for you. When you handle an existing IP, the fanbase is incredibly easy to please; just entertain (not just pander to) the fans, and you’ll get people to like both the movie and the games. There is a guaranteed viewership in the fans and they’ll serve as free advertising. Apart from the many creative liberties (omissions and pointless changes) from the source material the movie still fundamentally fails to tell a story. This is not about how they avoided the source material it’s about how they failed to make a decent movie even with a head start some people can only dream of.

Borderlands the Movie is a “washed-up chosen one meets dysfunctional ragtag family forced to save the day” story much like the MCU’s Guardians of the Galaxy minus the charm and logical writing. But we, the audience don’t and cannot care because we have been given no reason to. Lilith is played by Cate Blanchett, who has won two Academy Awards. She acts as an older badass who will do many bad things for the right price, at least I think she was acting. Every single character is constantly expressing how they don’t want to be here, and it’s looking like someone in the writing room is trying to tell us something.

The games have a fun setting because most of the character archetypes don’t belong in a space spaghetti western but are written to belong there anyway. Making the main character a lone wolf gunslinging noir detective may not have been the best choice.

In production the movie suffered from many rewrites,  and now most of the movie feels like its screenwriting was done by a child. *In a child’s voice* “th-there was a prison in space, a-and then, this girl was being taken away, a-a-and then, a short man rescued her and fought all the bad guys, and then this big psych jumped out of a glass prison cell (who put a psycho in a glass cell?) and beat up all the men with guns and they escaped….”

There seems to be an over reliance on fans recognizing the characters and just using existing info to fill in gaps, but why would you stray from the plot so much and take “creative liberties” (if you can call them that), if you WANT existing fans to watch it and apply existing knowledge. There is more respect for source material in literally every fanfic ever created. The half-baked introductions boil down to audiences recognizing costumes, and name drops in conversions. Some characters like Tannis are so distant from their source material that without their outfit and introduction, you’d never know who they are supposed to be.

Personally, I don’t think anyone likes toilet humour after the age of four, but as if Aquaman 2 wasn’t enough, Borderlands thought we would laugh at urine and faecal matter on actors faces. Masterful comedy I tell you.

I haven’t even gone into detail about the dialogue but they unironically had jokes like: “Oh yeah you and what army?”, “The one right behind me”, “Uhm guys, you’re gonna want to see this” “Ahh time to go insane”, and “He’s right behind me isn’t he?”. $120 million was spent on this? The Psycho lines were pretty well written but that’s all I can complement, I fear.

I also have to add that in order to balance out how mindlessly childish the rest of the movie is, Roland says a swear word every few minutes. Tiny swears sometimes too, but she cusses way more elegantly in the video games. It all ends up being very out of place.

Then there’s the scene where Lilith first finds Tina; easily the worst part of the whole movie. They are finally in a closed space with actual tension, and the cracks start to show. The movie does a lot of hiding behind explosions and fancy cars, and fails in situations where execution and storytelling is actually important. Their dialogue was rigid and unnatural, Tina was very out of character assuming we consider her to be based off the game character. Otherwise, movie Tina had little to no personality outside being an immature self-aware McGuffin who supposedly likes explosives, but throws them like she’s never played catch before, much less with C4; checks out with her daddy issues, I guess.

The big reveal at the end of the movie is **drumroll** Lilith is the Fire Hawk. What is a Fire Hawk you ask? No one can give a straight answer so we’ll never truly know. The third act big reveal with zero build up is a regurgitated combination of Video Game Lilith’s Bounty Hunter nickname, and her Siren abilities, both of which were revealed in the very first chunk of the first 2 games. So, it’s hardly a reveal for anyone who’s played the game for 5 seconds, and means almost nothing to first-timers. The final act is much of “It’s so over, we are so back”.

Players know the game for its signature cartoonish cel-shader look, and its very unique crude humour and procedurally generated weapons.

Borderlands is a fast-paced action role-playing first-person looter shooter video game franchise set in a sci-fi Wild West-inspired world. A mouthful I know but it brings so much to the table it’s quite addictive. Players know the game for its signature cartoonish cel-shader look, and its very unique crude humour and procedurally generated weapons.

Borderlands is one of the bloodiest games out there. The game is mature, hilariously so. Violence, suicide, and other triggers are the daily talk. Many characters get flirty; Tannis in particular has a healthy obsession with Maya, and flirts with the player’s character regardless of which you pick.

Since 2009 when the first game released, we have gotten five main titles, and a few spin offs, one of which being “Tales from the Borderlands” (2014), an episodic, narrative-driven adventure game developed by Telltale Games. Unlike the main series’ first-person shooter mechanics, this game focuses on storytelling. Saying this franchise can’t have good storytelling would be lying. I’d argue anyone who’s actually played the games easily sees it sprouting great stories naturally. The movie brushes off the game’s storytelling, but somehow also under-delivers on the guns.

The movie’s guns have no quirks of their respective brands, no Maliwan guns with elemental effects, Tediore with exploding reloads, or VLADOF’s high bullet count. The gun variety was ignored and that took out the looting from the looter shooter. Lilith’s weapon of choice is the Infinity gun by VLADOF that she dual-wields with many other pistols (that’s a Gunzerker skill and Lilith is a Siren but okay). At some point she reloads both her guns leading me to think she reloaded an infinity gun. Also, if it is, she reloads it like a Jacob’s gun when it’s a VLADOF.

A lot of Lilith’s fight-and-reload choreography in the gunfights is nice and fluid. Despite this, there’s like 4 major gun fights, and they are so similar and generic. The gun fights are mostly inconsequential, abusing the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy trope. Roland’s sacrifice was unnecessary and pointless considering it was immediately revealed that he survived. You can’t take anything seriously because there aren’t any resolutions. The villain will lose. The heroes will win. It happens time and time again so, the movie had no climax.

Director Eli Roth said the movie wasn’t going to be “too slavish”, he continued, “I didn’t just want to film the game. We wanted to tell a great story on its own, but of course it’s loaded with Easter eggs for the fans… “. I don’t think anyone knows who the the target audience of the Borderlands movie is.

BAFTA nominated costume designer, Daniel Orlandi, was on costume duty, and he and the team did one hell of a job. Gearbox Games CEO, Randy Pitchford, was present during production, so it’s very surprising the movie turned out the way it did. The world was brought to life through good costume design, gun design, and in-game brands. Unfortunately, the characters weren’t quite as alive. Borderlands also has a lot of cool tech, so it’s a shame they left out the Catch-a-ride system, and the Echonet barely made an appearance.

Many parts of the production feel like they were disassembled and put together many times. And there’s a lot of questionable resource management. There’s a scene they used in the trailer and movie where you can see the arm and face of a production assistant helping to open the manhole cover. So much of the movie has a lot of effort being put in some places (sometimes too much), and way too little put where it matters i.e., the random CGI jumps weren’t worth the cost at all.

One of the movie’s worst decisions was making a PG-13 movie based on a game rated M for Mature. That was entirely a financial decision, and it fell flat on its face. Did they think their “target audience” was old enough to play the M-rated game, but not old enough to see an R-rated film?

I don’t understand why Hollywood thinks getting an IP with an existing fanbase with preferences will just enjoy you taking characters and worlds, and just telling a subpar attempt at some third option. If you want to film the game but change a few things, do it, and stay very loyal to what made it appealing. That’s what the Last of Us did. If you like the game’s world, and want to do your own thing, play into the source’s sandbox like Studio Trigger’s Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. I think the latter would have worked best for the Borderlands Movie considering how much effort Roth put into a practical set (sacrificing the game’s signature cel shaded look), costumes, and vehicles.

The way I see it, one makes an adaptation of other people’s works by getting favourable elements from the original like things original fans loved, and adding movie magic on top of that. I find it pretty insulting when half the movie’s humour is mostly toilet jokes, and random dramatic explosions and gunshots.

Many characters were left out of the story, mostly because the writers found them difficult to include. So unfortunately, we didn’t get beloved characters like Handsome Jack, Angel, Flesh Stick, or Face MCShooty.

The ensemble main cast collectively has four Primetime Emmy Awards, a Tony Award, 2 Emmy Awards, a Grammy Award, 10 Golden Globe Awards, 5 Academy Awards, 5 BAFTA Awards, 5 Screen Actors Guild Awards, and four British Academy Film Awards.

Save for Marcus and Bobby Lee as Larry, I felt the casting and character portrayal was terrible. An expensive cast isn’t necessarily a good cast. I strongly feel as though little to no effort was made to maintain any of the characters’ identities in the casting. The casting director, Victoria Thomas, previously worked on Madame Web, but that probably doesn’t mean anything right? I jest. This wasn’t her best work, but she’s the BAFTA-winning casting director responsible for The Last of Us so, she probably isn’t the one to blame.

We all like Cate Blanchett, but it’s very difficult taking her seriously as Lilith especially with the tough bounty hunter trope that was just embarrassing to go through.

Game Lilith has always been self-assured, cocky and short tempered, always enjoying everything she does, and having pride in being a Siren. The movie literally took out the fire in her, and made her an old brooding anti-hero (in flesh and spirit) who’s awkwardly edgy and anti-social. Some characters describe her as “Lilith the scumbag”, and “horrendous evil woman” in an attempt to make us see the character that way, but the trope is so overplayed and artificial it feels very out of place.

In the games, Lilith belongs to the Siren class, a select few who have phase abilities like flight and telepathy. Every Siren then has a special unique ability like teleportation and technopathy. Lilith’s abilities in the movie are loosely based on these abilities, but they are executed so strangely it would be a waste of time trying to understand why things happened the way they did outside of “it would look cool”.

According to the videogame manual, Lilith claims her powers come from her crossing the “Hotness Threshold”. “Any woman as good looking as me can do what I do”, which I honestly believe to be canon. Assuming the movie takes place somewhere between Borderlands 1 and 2, Lilith should be between 22 and 27, and living out her prime. Cate Blanchett is almost 30 years older than Lilith was in the original Borderlands game. Now that generally shouldn’t matter, but it was very intentional to make Lilith and Tannis much older women in the movie. I like to believe Tannis was made older because Lilith has mommy issues, but even then, that was poorly looked into. The issue lies in both casting choices and dialogue/script quality.

I can summarize movie Roland’s entire character as: he’s short, a good soldier, and had an old fling with gender-bent commander Knox. This is unfortunate for a main character considering how rich his source material is. When I saw Roland’s introduction in the trailer, I was disappointed by how different he was, then I saw the movie, and it became many times worse. He’s such a memorable part of the game that this alone is enough of a reason to walk out the cinema.

Roland was an upbeat wisecrack who spoke in witty one-liners, but the more time he spent in action, the more difficult he found it to express himself. He even ended his relationship with Lilith in order to focus on Hyperion, and the Crimson Raiders. He is a reliable tough-as-steel ally, friend, and father figure to Tiny. In the movie, Kevin Hart is nothing like Roland ignoring the height difference. I find Hart’s self-deprecating humour, and comedy-skit style dialogue to be very distant from Roland who has a stoic demeanour and, you know, actually acts like a trained soldier. His entire character is dumbed down to a selfless hero who would die “because it’s the right thing to do” in his words.

Movie Tina… was cringe. Her line delivery wasn’t quite “Tina”, that can be said about most characters in this movie unfortunately. Tina in-game is actually my favourite character in Borderlands 2, and every single thing that comes out of her mouth in-game deserves to be framed on a wall. Iconic lines like “BURN ALL THE BABIES!!!!!”, and “That’s Mushy Snugglebites’ badonkadonk. She’s my main squeeze. Lady’s got a gut fulla’ dynamite and a booty like POOOW!”. This Tina is hit or miss, with a lot of misses. She can’t even say badonkadonk properly, and this makes me sad. Tina leaving Lilith towards the end doesn’t make sense at all too.

Krieg has the least backstory but in-game he is a comic-relief character with the best lines, and the darkest backstory. Hyperion experimented on him, and his only friend was a rat named Tawanda (I’m not making this up that’s just how deep his story goes). He has 2 personalities, and goes through moral decay as a result of killing people. His personalities are split, and at some point, his sane personality gives up and loses control of his body, and his psycho personality saves him. He has a pact with his psycho persona that he’ll destroy himself if psycho Krieg ever harms an innocent. His relationship with Tiny Tina is fair I guess. He once taught her how to speak psycho (it’s actually quite understandable if you know what to look for). He has a beautiful relationship with Maya the Siren as she’s the only person who understands what he says.

In conclusion, Borderlands serves as a stark reminder that even beloved source material, and a high budget can’t guarantee a successful adaptation. The movie’s fundamental issues arise from its lack of respect for the source material, misguided creative liberties, and a diluted approach to the franchise’s iconic dark humour and chaotic energy. While the film’s production boasted commendable efforts in visuals and casting, its failure can ultimately be attributed to its detachment from the game’s core themes, characters, and humour. It faltered in capturing the essence that made the games so engaging. By opting for shallow spectacle over character-driven storytelling, the movie not only disappoints fans, but also misses the opportunity to resonate with new audiences, rendering it a cautionary example for future adaptations.