Borderlands: Ouch

When the Borderlands movie was first announced, I wanted to have a little hope, but I couldn’t help but be excited. Borderlands 2 is probably my favourite computer game of all time. Well, depending on the day—you know how it is. With each piece of news released about the movie, my expectations degraded. By the date of release, I had no motivation to check it out. Everything I heard about it reinforced my lack of interest.

Then I had a chance to watch it. I had a chance to watch a bunch of movies, and Borderlands was actually near the end of the list.

Wow. That was . . . bad. Remember when game movies were cash grabs seemingly bereft of anything but the most superficial understanding of the game? Yeah. Like that.

I don’t know what else to say. I thought that the movie was being made by those who loved the game. If they did, they only seemed to love certain very specific aspects of the game, and the storyline and feel of the game was not those aspects.

So, the characters have only a surface similarity to the character in the game. Their personalities and purposes are like poor reflections seen through dim lighting. There’s only a tangential link. You can recognize who the character is supposed to be, but not much else.

The action wasn’t particularly well choreographed—more like the action from Hollywood 1980s action movies. Loud but not impressive. Lacking even a hint of artistry. The acting was . . . I’m not going to say bad, but given the cast, it was pretty pedestrian. That’s probably because the script could have been generated by AI, lacking any soul or depth. Again, pedestrian is probably the best description of it.

I could go on. I’m not going to. If you haven’t seen it yet, don’t.

Was there anything good? I did like the relationship between Tiny Tina and Kreig—more like siblings than parental and certainly not romantic. Even that drifted into exploitative sometime—with Tina directing Kreig rather than having his actions develop organically.

The setting and production design was pretty good. At some points it did a good job of replicating the look and feel of Borderlands. At some points.

That’s it. And those were transitory and uneven successes.

I wish I had better news.

I give Borderlands 1 very ordinary and not exceptional firearm out of 5. Any similarities to the awesome computer game as superficial, and there’s none of what makes the game special on the screen.