Borderlands

Over the last two decades, there has been a consistent wave of successful videogames getting a live-action reimagining in cinemas, from Tomb Raider to Sonic the Hedgehog, but this bridge-building between the two industries often goes one of two ways; a reasonable success that pleases both film lovers and gamers, or an absolute car crash that leaves loyal game players offended and fails to stand up as a coherent movie on its own. Eli Roth’s Borderlands is the latest release to be subjected to this volatile test.

Returning to her home planet Pandora, infamous bounty hunter Lilith (Cate Blanchett) is hired to find the missing daughter of the universe’s most powerful men. Before long, she forms an unexpected alliance with a ragtag team of misfits including soldier Roland (Kevin Hart, an axe-wielding savage named Krieg (Florian Munteanu) and Dr Patricia Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), a friend of her mother and link to Lilith’s past. Together, they battle alien monsters and dangerous bandits to uncover one of Pandora’s most explosive secrets.

Blanchett really chooses her movies and you have to ask how on earth the casting directors managed to pull off signing the multi-award winning actor to this project. The star holds this movie together by herself, taking her role as Lilith very seriously and you can see she is having an absolute ball in the role, but she is done absolutely no favours with the dialogue she is made to deliver. You could not have written more on-the-nose dialogue if you tried and soundbites from the game are littered throughout, shoehorned into battles and interactions unnecessarily.

Borderlands is a poorly crafted action adventure that serves as nothing but fan service to loyal players of the videogame. Every scene is unimaginative and uninspiring, with literally everything in this movie happening purely for convenience and to move the plot forward. The pacing and editing is a hot mess, more likely to leave you with a migraine rather than an adrenaline pump, albeit the Guardians of the Galaxy meets Mad Max-style universe is cool to explore thanks to the creators behind the video games. The potential for further world-building is clearly there, but the screenplay refuses to let any of that happen, racing through scenes and spending more time focusing on fight sequences instead of character building or meaningful discourse.

There are prime examples out there of how to make a videogame palatable for live-action – just look at HBO’s The Last of Us – but it seems most studios are more keen on making a quick buck rather than creating a product that the consumer would want to see more of. Whether Borderlands makes a profit will be discovered soon, but for now let’s hope this disaster of a film finally acts as a message to studio executives that not every successful videogame needs to be transferred to the big screen for cash-making purposes.

Guy Lambert

Borderlands is released nationwide on 8^th August 2024.

Watch the trailer for Borderlands here: