‘Borderlands’ Is a Masterclass In How Not To Make a Video Game Adaptation

We’re halfway through 2024, so it feels more than fair to say that I’ve already seen one of the worst films that I’m going to watch this year. Borderlands, Eli Roth’s film adapted from a video game of the same name, has a stacked cast led by Cate Blanchett. And yet, it is giving nothing. 

Spoilers ahead for Borderlands!

After a stellar past year with some noteworthy video game adaptations like the Emmy award-winning The Last Of Us and Fallout, watching Borderlands felt like being zapped back in time to the bright-colored, hazy aesthetics of Spy Kids 3D: Game Over. Now this in no way trashes Spy Kids 3 which was a hoot for its time, but definitely puts things in perspective for the CGI, world-building, and storytelling of Borderlands. At least Spy Kids was fun, had heart, and its ending wasn’t a convoluted mess.

Borderlands, on the other hand, is a masterclass in how NOT to make a video game adaptation.

For starters, Borderlands fails incredulously at world-building. While exposition is often considered one of the weaker narrative tools, in science fiction and fantasy, it’s kind of necessary because of all the lore you’ve got to get exposed to. Borderlands has plenty of it—the film begins with a monologue from Blanchett’s Lilith, talking about Eridians and their vault on Pandora, etc. And yet, unlike her iconic opening monologue from a certain other fantasy film she starred in, this one is utterly lackluster and helps you understand nothing about the world you’re about to be thrust into.

In the course of the movie, we spend time on two planets—Pandora and Cytherea. And for the life of me, I could barely tell the difference. The set design looks like a graveyard where the discarded elements of past sci-fi movies came to die. As if the lackluster CGI and jarring explosion of color weren’t bad enough, the film had some very noticeable dubbing issues too; in one scene, you could clearly make out that Cate Blanchett’s mouth did not speak the words that we just heard in her voice. So the film doesn’t look good, and it also doesn’t feel good either.

There’s no clear framework or rules established for these new worlds we’re exploring. Who are the people that live on this land? What do they want? What happened here? We don’t know enough about the Eridians either, so in the climax when Lilith gets her powers, we never quite gauge what its expanses and limitations are. Whatever happens has to be taken at face value, sans context.

In another scene, the robot Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black) is shot by a bunch of Psychos and he doesn’t even short a wire. Any questions you might have on what this world and its elements are made up of, leave them at the door. Where are these people getting their ammunition from? Don’t they run out? What powers the guns of the bad guy? No idea.

What are its people made of? No idea either. The characters don’t get fleshed out or given any emotional backstories that might make you care about them. We never get to spend time getting to know Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) as a little girl or why Roland (Kevin Hart) became a rogue mercenary in the first place, or why Krieg (Florian Munteanu) the Psycho chose to help these two people out at all. Does Tina see the father figure she never had in Atlas (Édgar Ramirez) in Roland?

There’s no scene where the film takes a breather for a second to let its characters build that emotional connection with each other, to give this rag-tag team something to hold on to, which would eventually evolve into a found-family dynamic. If one of them died, I wouldn’t have batted an eye (except maybe the robot). And one of them does die. In a scene that made most people my theatre go, “WTF?” Knoxx, the commander of Atlas’ Crimson Lance private army, suddenly has a change of heart and wants to save the good guys. Even before we can get a beat to understand what could’ve brought this on, she’s vaporized. It’s as if there’s something in Pandora’s air that is averse to any show of emotion!

Video games have some of the most incredible storytelling. But even if your source material is thinly etched, when you’re adapting it for the screen, you have the chance to fill in any gaps and lend some emotional depth and weight to the characters’ choices and actions (See: George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood and its adaptation, House of The Dragon). Otherwise, what is even the point of turning a game that people can already be a part of into a movie that they’re going to be mere spectators to if you can’t engage them differently? Borderlands never engages us as an audience, and its world continues to feel alien, which only those who might’ve played the games could perhaps fully comprehend. 

Borderlands‘ biggest fault is that it’s boring. And the actors look like they know it, because even their performances aren’t chafing in any effort to make the hand they’ve been dealt better. Whatever the film lacks in storytelling, it could’ve tried to make up for with its action sequences or the banter between its characters. But it falters even in those departments. The only saving grace on certain occasions is the robot Claptrap, but it’s hard not to wonder if, in the hands of a better writer, the relationship between Claptrap and Lilith might’ve been something truly entertaining. This isn’t our first Chosen One with a robot sidekick rodeo.

When you discover, as you dig deep into the film’s time spent in developmental hell, that Craig Mazin, creator of The Last Of Us, was associated with Borderlands at one point and was supposed to work on its screenplay, you can’t help but lament over what the depth could’ve had. In Borderlands lore, the Eridians’ Vaults are said to cage in eldritch beasts, like the tentacled one that rears its head in the film’s climax. I’d strongly suggest they chuck this film in a similar Vault and lock it away, because maybe, just maybe, not all video games can be adapted into movies.