With some films you need to decide if your glass of piss wash is half full or half empty.
I went into the Borderlands movie with no prior knowledge of Borderlands (beyond the vague awareness it existed). I’ve never played any of the games and know nothing of its lore. I also knew nothing of its fraught journey to the big screen or production troubles that seemingly included revolving door writers and a change of director for reshoots, something which never goes awry. /s
When his daughter Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) is kidnapped, intergalactic oligarch Deukalian Atlas (Edgar Ramirez) hires renowned bounty hunter Lillith (Cate Blanchett) to journey to Pandora and rescue her. But once she arrives on the desolate, destitute world, Lillith finds the situation is much more complicated and finds herself joining forces with Roland (Kevin Hart), Krieg (Florian Munteanu), Doctor Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis) and a robot called Claptrap (Jack Black) to try and find the fabled Vault, believed to contain powerful alien technology.
While it may have – at least according to fans of the games upon which it’s based – missed the mark in terms of tone and energy, what is abundantly clear is that it desperately wants to be a knock-off Guardians Of The Galaxy. It’s a laudable aim but one the film absolutely fails to achieve and, in the attempt, succeeds only in alienating a fanbase who clearly wanted a harder, edgier, more faithful take on the material. Ultimately, it’s a curse that will forever haunt adaptations of video games: stray too far from the source material and you earn the ire of the fans who were clamouring for the movie in the first place. Stick too closely to the material and you might as well call yourself “Cut Scene: The Motion Picture”.
While the movie was never going to replicate the cel-shaded aesthetic of the games, the production design does seem to do a decent job of translating the look of Pandora to the big screen although some of the CGI is a bit lifeless and, at this point, any use of Vasquez Rocks in a sci-fi movie is bordering on cliché, the visual equivalent of the Wilhelm Scream.
The cast, which includes big names like Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, and Jamie Lee Curtis, does its best with the material, and if you can let go of everything Borderlands isn’t, you’ll find you start to have fun with it. Blanchett’s portrayal of Lilith is a highlight, but many of the other characters feel a little underdeveloped, particularly Kreig. Although Kevin Hart’s role as Roland, in particular, feels furthest away from who the character was in the source material, he’s good value as a generic motormouth merc/ heroic comic relief.
The plot seems to try to cover a lot of ground even if it does boil down to a post-apocalyptic sci-fi version of Holes and there’s the usual video-game to movie adaptation problem of lazy world-building, an assumption that you’re there because you’re a fan of the game and therefore don’t need much explained to you, which leaves the wider general audience adrift in a sea of references they don’t really get.
Enough of what Borderlands isn’t though, and on to what it is, and that is a colourful, kinetic update of all-but-forgotten eighties sci-fi schlock Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s a cheap and cheerful sci-fi adventure featuring Peter Strauss, Molly Ringwald, Ernie Hudson and Michael Ironside about a ragtag band of bounty hunters mounting a rescue mission on a desolate planet populated by hostile mutants and, like Borderlands, is a lot of fun if you lower your expectations accordingly.
