Quick Synopsis: A group of people aren’t friends, but have to work together to do something to save others. Yeah, original.
I love watching films, I’d just like to point that out (just in case the almost 500 reviews on this site didn’t make that clear). But I’m not one of those people who hunt down trailers of everything and absorb information about everything that’s coming out. My at-home trailer use mainly consists of films I already know I’m interested in/curious about. The way I find myself watching NEW trailers is generally at the cinema itself. So I distinctly remember the first time I watched this trailer (I believe it was one of the trailers before Frozen Empire), I turned towards my cousin and said “Well someone’s watched Guardians Of The Galaxy”. The whole thing looked like a mockbuster GOTG directed by some music video guy on a budget of $11.50 and a tin of chopped tomatoes, starring the editor’s best friends cousin’s wife, only it was directed by Eli Roth and had a budget of around $120million, starring scream queen (and star of Scream Queen) Jamie Lee Curtis, five-time winner of “ohhhhh, her, I like her” award Cate Blanchett (whose crown has now been taken by Olivia Colman), and the person who stole the “I’m gonna fuck that Peach” award from Timothee Chalamet, Jack Black.
Maybe that was just the marketing, maybe the film itself will actually be surprisingly good. I mean, it’s directed by a competent director and has a very talented cast. So there’s always a possibility it will actually be really good. But is it? To answer that question I’ll show you a sentence I sent to someone after I left the cinema that day:
“Watched Borderlands and the new Alien movie today. The new Alien is very good”
That sums it up. Borderlands is not just bad compared to Alien (spoilers for that review), it’s a bad film. For a storyteller as creative and visionary as Eli Roth, Borderlands is a shockingly cliche piece of work. It follows the standard “ragtag group of misfits go in search of a MacGuffin” plot that has already been seen in both GOTG and DAD: HAT. It has gone through ten different scriptwriters in its development, and usually, that causes a film to be inconsistent and a tonal mess. Thankfully that’s not the case here, it keeps a pretty even tone and level of quality throughout; it’s just a shame that level of quality is complete shit. I’m not going to go into the “Blanchett is 52 but the character in the game is 22, and the character Kevin Hart plays is taller” etc. Those are valid concerns and criticisms for fans of the game, but I’ve never played the games so they didn’t affect my enjoyment of it at all. In fact, the cast is one of the few things Borderlands has going for it (and there are some subtle visual storytelling touches which are really good), everything else sucks.
It’s not terrible in a “nobody is trying” way, people are trying, they’re just making terrible decisions. The chief one is the violence, there’s not any. Borderlands NEEDS blood, this film is crying out for it. I’m guessing it’s so it can get a 12A rating instead of a 15, and thus appeal to more people. It’s clear that the studio wanted Borderlands aimed at the mass market, which was a mistake. Not only because of the lack of violence but also because it seems to assume the audience is full of idiots. That’s clear from the opening, which features far too much narration, and holds your hand more than a nervous mother teaching her child to cross the road. It doesn’t trust you to work something out for yourself. Such is its dedication to “No questions! No wonder!” I’m surprised that every character isn’t introduced with a fact sheet saying where you’re likely to know each actor from. The most egregious demonstration of this is when the film tells us that Lilith is from Pandora. Now, how do you think this film did it?
- “I haven’t been there in a long time”, and leave the meaning hanging in the air.
- Have another character tell them “I need you for this job, I know you were born there”
- When she arrives on the planet, have her say something along the lines of “This planet is shit, I should know, I was born here”.
Take a guess. I’ll wait. Have you guessed? Congratulations! You’re correct. I’m not saying that because I guessed that you picked the one most likely, I’m saying that because whichever one you picked you are correct since it does all three. They aren’t even spread out, all three of them take place within a few minutes. So it’s not even “we’re recapping this in case you went to the toilet”. There are other issues with the writing; primarily the amount of moments which make no sense.
The best example; everybody in the group is wanted by the police, so how do they disguise themselves? With a hologram mask. One of the characters has bright red hair, one talks like Kevin Hart, one is giant and muscled, one is a one-of-a-kind robot, and another has bunny ears. With all those visual and audio clues, I don’t think “slight covering of the face” is going to do much good to hide your face. If you saw Superman walking around in full costume but wearing a Lucha Libre wrestling mask, I’m pretty sure you’d still recognise it’s him by the giant fucking S on his chest. Same issue here. That’s not an issue for long as the masks are never used again once the characters pass that level scene. Fuck it, I hid it there but I’m going to flat-out say it here now; there’s zero cohesion between different scenes, as such they all come off as a series of levels rather than one continual narrative. As a result, it sometimes feels like we’re not watching a movie, but instead seeing a 2-hour “highlights” package from a 13-hour videogame. That’s why there are random things which aren’t explained at all, why certain characters’ relationships with each other seem to be based not on emotion or truth, but on the amount of time left in the film, and why it makes bafflingly random time skips at a level not seen since Fant4stic.
It’s nowhere near as bad as Madame Web was, but that’s damning it with faint praise. As I said, the performances from the leads are fine, Ariana Greenblatt in particular is a ball of chaotic energy. There are some nice ideas at play here, and the visuals are pretty nice to look at. But otherwise? When the universe collapses in on itself and completely destroys existence, the resulting void of infinite nothingness will still have more stars than this deserves out of 5. Harsh? Yes, but it deserves it.
Troubled Productions 