The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend Borderlands
There is a reason that men hate a Mary Sue more than women. Men care about another man’s struggles.
Women don’t care about men’s struggles at all. Not even a little bit. They just wait at the finish line and bang the winner. This is the Heroine’s Journey in a nutshell.
Normally when I look at a film like Borderlands, I’m left wondering, “How do you make a movie as bad as this?” In this case, I already knew the answer; “You have no idea how a movie like this is supposed to be made… But then you go ahead and make it anyway.”
Cluelessness pervades every aspect of this motion picture. Nobody knew what the hell they were trying to do let alone have a clue about how to accomplish it. Casting, direction, writing, production management, executive production management, marketing, even the timing was bad. You name it, it couldn’t find its ass with both hands.
We’ll start from the top.
If you get some early 2000s Marvel movie gone wrong vibes, there’s a reason for that. Ari Arad is the reason. Ike Perlmutter’s former partner has had his successes but they were a while back and he is still sticking to things that worked well 20 years ago but not so much now. Arad would have been the one insisting on a PG-13 rating. He’s still trying to bring in “the kids.” Except he still thinks Millennials are still “the kids.” They aren’t. Zoomers don’t like going to the movies and they weren’t allowed to play Borderlands 2 back when that was a thing in 2012.
Although it’s not just Arad. This is Gearbox’s first movie, gamers have a love/hate but mostly hate relationship with Gearbox and gamers have a hate/hate but mostly hate relationship with Randy Pitchford. His direct involvement didn’t go over well with the gaming community which is of course the primary market. The moment Borderlands fans saw it was PG-13 instead of R, they knew Hollywood had ruined it and the Grease Demon had gone along with it.
Finally, there was the director, Eli Roth.
Roth makes entertaining splatter porn movies like Cabin Fever, Hostel, and the criminally underrated House with the Clock in the Walls (a movie that starred coincidently Cate Blanchett and Jack Black).
This movie was announced in 2015, with Saw director Leigh Wannel signed to direct. When development began in earnest in 2020, Roth had been brought on board to replace him. Switching from Wannel to Roth was clearly a lateral move. At one point this movie was apparently meant to be as gorey as, well a Borderlands game. Hiring Roth from that perspective made sense I suppose but then Arad decided that it had to be PG-13. Borderlands can work as black comedy but once you took the blood out of it, it was going to be an action comedy. Eli Roth does horror, not action, he has no background in it at all. Peter Verhoeven, would have known what he was doing with a gorey, sci-fi satire. Eli Roth did not. Arad and company were clearly unhappy with what he delivered because Tim Miller replaced Roth in the reshoots.
Anyway, Roth was signed to direct in 2020 then Cate Blanchett was hired shortly afterward. I’m sure Roth insisted because she was the best actress he’d ever worked with. It’s also good Woke politics. A 55-year-old woman pleases the male gaze less than a 25-year-old. Then they hired Gina Gershon and Jamie Lee Curtis. The really sad part is that these actresses were perfect for their roles…
… If the year was 1995.
Showgirls-era Gina Gershon would have been great as Moxxxie. True Lies’ Jamie Lee Curtis would have been a capable choice for Tanis. Cate Blanchett would have been perfect as Lilith when she was playing Elizabeth. But this is 2014, Cate is 55, Gershon is 62, and Jamie Lee Curtis is now a grande dame at 65. Three of the four main female roles had already aged out their parts long before these characters ever existed.
I know what was going on. The lead actress can’t be outshined by a bunch of much younger women, she’ll never stand for it. So they emptied out the SAG Actresses Retirement Home and again good Woke politics. Although, these never make for big box office receipts.
It wasn’t just the women either. Kevin Hart was a terrible choice for Roland, Anthony Mackie or Jon Boyega would have been infinitely better for the role. Kevin Hart does comedy, not action. You just couldn’t take him seriously as Jack Black as the voice of Clap Trap should have worked but apparently, the only thing Eli Roth knew about the little robot was that he’s supposed to be kind of annoying, so he told Black to be as annoying as possible, and (sigh), he delivered. Jack Black is just grating to listen to throughout this whole flick.
Krieg wasn’t a great choice but he was at least an understandable one. The only real option for Brick right now is Dave Bautista. When he said, no, it was just easier to move on to another character entirely.
I have no idea who to blame for the writing because Craig Maizen (Chernyobel) demanded that his name be removed from the credits.
This is one of those movies where it’s very difficult to remember the plot because there isn’t one. It starts off with an exposition scene explaining Eridians, Pandora, and the Vault. Kind of hamhanded but it’s serviceable. Show is always better than Tell but if that isn’t working, it has to be Tell.
Roland breaks Tiny Tina out of her holding cell for no explained reason. I mean that, we never find out why he did it.
We switch to geriatric bounty hunter Lillith dragging a bounty into a bar so she can have a drink and show what a tough girl-boss she is. (Fast forward) The head of the Atlas corporation offers her a bounty to find Tiny Tina, even though Lillith hates Pandora because she’s from there and sand gets everywhere.
It takes about 15 minutes to get Lillith on Marcus Kincaid’s armored bus. And once she’s there, Ain’t No Rest For the Wicked completely fails to play. Borderlands’ signature song is nowhere to be heard in this movie. I won’t say it’s like Star Wars without the Star Wars theme but it’s close.
Lilith spends a fruitless montage scene hunting for Tina but finally finds her. Then she has to fight Roland and Krieg because they like Tina for some reason that is again never explained. The Crimson Lance shows up so they all fight them and then run off.
They are now friends because if they aren’t, the rest of the movie won’t happen.
The MacGuffin is explained. Only an Eridanian can open the vault and Tina is genetically constructed to be one. She is literally “The Girl Who is the Key to Everything.” Except it’s not her, it’s Lillith. I’m not going to try and drag you through that ill-constructed plot structure house of cards. There may have been an explanation for it at one point but it was lost on the cutting room floor. Bottom line, the film’s story was that Lillith needed to find out how truly powerful she always was all along.
Typical Feminist Heroine’s Journey.
It wasn’t just the story that was bad. Eli Roth clearly didn’t understand how a John Woo action scene worked but apparently had been instructed to mimic one. So you do see a lot of Gun-Fu poses and shooting, but that only works if the shooter is integral to the action, it needs to basically be in the third person.
Roth was using the Gun-Fu acrobatics but was using 80s blast-flick style hard cuts. Here’s an example: Arnold firing a machine gun, HARDCUT, stuntmen jerking around, and falling over. It’s not just that it’s out of fashion, the editor was just shotgunning stuntmen’s reaction takes while ignoring perspective. Example: Roland is aiming downward when he fires, HARDCUT, guy on top of a building falls off. Example: Lilith gets slammed into a crate by a Psycho, HARDCUT, Psycho has vanished and Lillith is shooting at the camera.
The strategy was clearly one of; pummel the audience with action shots and hope they will be too dazed to notice it doesn’t make sense.
Even the marketing was all wrong. Furiosa was arguably not a girl boss movie but it was promoted as one and it tanked because of it. Audiences are sick of them and won’t show up. Borderlands was marketed as a girl-boss movie and it went virtually unwatched this weekend at a $9 million box office take. Utterly clueless.
When people talk about how much they love the game Borderlands, what they mean is they love Borderlands 2. The first one was okay, but the difference between Borderlands and Borderlands 2 is like the difference between Portal and Portal 2. The basics were there in the original but they were much more fully realized and fleshed out in the second one. However, Portal 3 is far superior to Borderlands 3 in that it doesn’t exist. The only Borderlands games that are any good at all are the ones with Handsome Jack in them.
Handsome Jack isn’t in this. Not even in post credit scene cameo. The Handsome Jack thing carries over to Borderlands movies as it turns out, this one was bad too.
There is absolutely no reason to watch this movie. If they could have got something wrong, they did, consequently…
The Dark Herald does not recommend Borderlands
