Director/Screen Story – Eli Roth, Screenplay – Joe Crombie & Eli Roth, Based on the Videogame Borderlands (2009) Created by Gearbox Software & 2K, Producers – Ari Arad, Avi Arad & Erik Feig, Photography – Roger Stoffers, Music – Steve Jablonsky, Visual Effects Supervisor – Steve Stokdyk, Visual Effects – Axis Studio (Supervisor – Gary Kelly), Blur Studio (Supervisor – Darren Butler), Crafty Apes VFX Ltd. (Supervisors – Mark Bortolotto & Jessica Harris), Darkred Studios, Double Negative (Supervisor – Benoit De Longlee & Francois Lambert), FotoKem (Supervisor – Karen Nichols), Framestore (Supervisor – Avi Goodman), Pixomondo (Supervisor – Goran Backman & Bojan Zoric), ReDefine (Supervisor – Ferran Domenech, Manolo Montero & Viral Thacker), Rodeo FX Inc. & Twisted Media, Special Effects Supervisor – Gabor ‘Gege’ Kiszelly, Production Design – Andrew Menzies. Production Company – Arad Productions/Picturestart/Gearbox Studios/2K.
Cast
Cate Blanchett (Lilith), Kevin Hart (Roland), Jack Black (Voice of Claptrap), Ariana Greenblatt (Tiny Tina), Jamie Lee Curtis (Patricia Tannis), Florian Munteanu (Krieg), Edgar Ramirez (Deukalian Atlas), Janina Gavankar (Commander Knoxx), Gina Gershon (Moxxi), Benjamin Byron Davis (Marcus), Bobby Lee (Larry)
Plot
On the planet Promethea, the bounty hunter Lilith is approached by Deukalian Atlas, president of the powerful Atlas Corporation, and recruited to retrieve his daughter Tiny Tina. This requires Lilith returning to her homeworld Pandora that she was sent away from as a child. Pandora is a lawless hive of anarchy that is regarded as the worst planet in the galaxy. Lilith lands and sets out to find where Tiny Tina is. She is aided by Claptrap, a robot that has been left by her mother to aid her in the eventuality of her return to Pandora. She finds Tina, who proves unwilling to return to her father and avoids capture with the use of improvised explosives and her hulking companion Krieg. They flee as Atlas’s Crimson Lance troops come in pursuit where they are aided by the former soldier Roland. Most of the people on Pandora are in search of the whereabouts of The Vault left by the alien Eridians and the prophecy that a daughter of Pandora will be able to open it. It is revealed that Tina was genetically engineered by Atlas from Eridian DNA for the specific purpose of opening The Vault. The group realise that their only solution is for them to find The Vault and so seek the expertise of Vault expert Tannis and set out to locate it while under heavy pursuit.
Borderlands (2009) is a popular videogame from the US-based Gearbox Entertainment. It is a first-person shooter that takes place on the planet Pandora where the player gathers weapons and loot while shooting down assorted creatures and rivals along the way. This proved of sufficient popularity that a further six games have been released. A film version has been announced since 2015 under the aegis of former Marvel Studios producer Avi Arad.
After passing through several hands, the Borderlands film ends up under Eli Roth. Roth emerged with the modest hit of Cabin Fever (2002) and then went on to Hostel (2005), which was a big hit that inaugurated the Torture Porn cycle and identified Roth with gut-squirming, boundary-pushing horror. Since then, Roth has made the likes of Hostel Part II (2007), The Green Inferno (2013), Knock Knock (2015), the remake of Death Wish (2018), The House With a Clock in Its Walls (2018) and Thanksgiving (2023).
The production ran into problems. The studio demanded that Eli Roth’s original R-rated version, which he saw as faithful to the tone of the videogame, be cut. The film was shot in 2021 but ended up sitting on the shelf for two years, before Tim Miller, the director of Deadpool (2016), was brought in to conduct reshoots and trim Roth’s cut back down to a PG-13 rating. Original screenwriter Craig Mazin, best known for Superhero Movie (2008) and tv’s Chernobyl (2019) and The Last of Us (2023- ), asked that his name be taken off the result.
Cate Blanchett as Lilith in action
When it opened, Borderlands was immediately slapped with labels like ‘the worst videogame adaptation ever.’ I am a little dubious about this. A lot of this seems like hyperbole thrown up by the fan contingent every time they dislike something – fairly much the same was said of Uwe Boll’s various videogame adaptations – House of the Dead (2003), Alone in the Dark (2005), Bloodrayne (2005) and Postal (2007) when they came out. It is hard to think of anybody finding Borderlands a worse videogame adaptation than Super Mario Bros. (1993). A quick Google of ‘worst videogame adaptations’ finds the poll place in most lists is a vie between Super Mario Bros. and Boll’s Alone in the Dark.
I’m not a gamer – nothing against games, I just find too much of my day consumed by film watching and writing to afford the time – so I come from a place largely unconcerned about faithfulness to the original. The other problem with Borderlands may well have been the reports of production interference, which can often cast a pall over a film in advance and presage the expectation of disaster. Certainly, Borderlands is a film where you await someday the delivery of a director’s cut and the likelihood that it would radically alter the tone of the film.
For my money, I didn’t find Borderlands terrible. What it read as to me is like one of the numerous spacegoing adventure films that came in the aftermath of Star Wars (1977) – in particular, a Planetary Adventure akin to something like the quest across the junkyard world in Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (1983) or the quirky bizarreness of Accion Mutante (1993).
(l to r) Lilith (Cate Blanchett), Roland (Kevin Hart), Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), Krieg (Florian Munteanu) and Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis)
You get the impression from the bar scene right near the start that Eli Roth is not taking much of the action seriously. This is something that need not necessarily be a problem for a film. Roth seems to be aiming for a cocky, flip vibe that wavers in its successfulness. A few scenes later when it comes to Cate Blanchett trying to rein in waif Ariana Greenblatt as they come under attack, Roth hits more of a cartoony slapstick tone as though he is trying to aim for the surreally over-the-top action of Robert Rodriguez’s films but not quite getting there. That said, by the middle of the film, following the introduction of Jamie Lee Curtis, most of the action sequences have settled in and don’t feel as consciously silly.
One of the drawbacks of the film is the inclusion of the robot Claptrap. I know it is part of the game but it is also one of the most annoyingly stupid robots in the history of cinema since at least No 5 in Short Circuit (1986) and in particular its sequel Short Circuit 2 (1988). For some reason, Jack Black voices the role in a falsetto that sounds a spitting imitation of Patton Oswalt. Possibly the lamest scene in the entire film is one where Roth has Claptrap doing a stand-up improv routine as distraction in the middle of the Bloodshot stronghold, followed by a scene where it shits bullets.
For a videogame adaptation, Borderlands has a surprisingly high calibre of actors attached to it. The name that makes you do a double-take is Cate Blanchett – yes, that five time Academy Award nominee, two times winner Cate Blanchett. Slotting into the sort of role that feels like it should have been inhabited by a Kurt Russell or a Bruce Willis in their action hero heyday, it cannot help but feel that Cate is slumming it, but she at least holds up in the part. Some of the other performances are way all over the place. Gina Gershon plays the owner of a bar like a bad Mae West copycat, while Ariana Greenblatt seems to have modeled hers on playing a junior version of Harley Quinn.
