[Lionsgate] Borderlands

[Old_Nash_II]

Teaser preview, full trailer tomorrow, and first poster

[Dynaman]

looks terrible, but perhaps fun.  A solid maybe for watching when it ends up streaming somewhere.

[Old_Nash_II]

Official trailer #1

 

[F-ZeroOne]

I mean, it has "B" at best written all over it, but Jamie Lee Curtis as Tannis? Boy, I hope they keep the thing with the chairs. 😄

[Seto Kaiba]

Yeah this looks like it's going to go in the same category as the Doom movie with The Rock.

Might be in so bad it's good territory, but definitely not good good.

[Knight26]

Looks to be same quality all around as the Twisted Metal series, might be a fun B Movie watch

[TangledThorns]

It's like a re-skinned Guardians of The Galaxy. I'll probably catch it on streaming tho.

[Big s]

4 hours ago, TangledThorns said:

It's like a re-skinned Guardians of The Galaxy. I'll probably catch it on streaming tho.

Definitely have to agree. It sorta looks like they just completely copied one of their trailers, music and all. I might still check it out, but it has Kevin Hart so I’ll see if it gets any good buzz. He’s just one of those actors/ comedians that I never really cared for.

[Valkyrie Hunter D]

[Old_Nash_II]

 

 

[Sanity is Optional]

That looks just as generic as I expected.

[Seto Kaiba]

Called it... this is going to be Doom movie levels of bad. 🤣

That kind of makes me want to see it, just to be behold a beautiful disaster unfolding.

[Big s]

6 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Called it... this is going to be Doom movie levels of bad. 🤣

That kind of makes me want to see it, just to be behold a beautiful disaster unfolding.

Doom was bad, but nothing beats that house of the dead movie.

Doom made it feel like you were watching someone play a video game, House of the dead was so lazy that they literally showed someone playing the video game for the action scenes 

[Roy Focker]

10 hours ago, Sanity is Optional said:

That looks just as generic as I expected.

Don't you mean geriatric?

 

[Sanity is Optional]

16 hours ago, Roy Focker said:

Don't you mean geriatric?

 

That too.

[Seto Kaiba]

18 hours ago, Big s said:

Doom was bad, but nothing beats that house of the dead movie.

True, Uwe Boll's gleeful incompetence in the director's seat made him the undisputed king of awful adaptations.  His schlock's usually unwatchable because it's bad on every level.

Andzrej Bartkowiak's Doom was undeniably a bad movie, but it was a fun bad movie because it was still competently produced despite every single creative decision that went into it being wrong.

Borderlands looks like it's shaping up to be another one of those competently produced, but creatively tone-deaf, adaptations that could best be described as "entertainingly wrong".

[Thom]

Unfortunately, that looked like it was just a running series of gag jokes. Does not make me want to watch it...

[Old_Nash_II]

And the final trailer

 

 

[TangledThorns]

No surprise.

 

Borderlands Review

https://www.ign.com/articles/borderlands-review-cate-blanchett-kevin-hart-jack-black

[Old_Nash_II]

1 hour ago, TangledThorns said:

No surprise.

 

Borderlands Review

https://www.ign.com/articles/borderlands-review-cate-blanchett-kevin-hart-jack-black

Now, we waiting for The Crow 2024 XD

[Seto Kaiba]

We all knew it was gonna be schlock... so the only thing that's really surprising about the reviews is how much they're struggling to find anything nice to say about the movie. 🤣

I disagree with IGN's claim that there's no videogame movie curse.  There very clearly is one, because this film by any indication is one hell of a cursed object.

[Chowser]

My kid said no after watching the trailer.  He's played the game.  He said it's worse than some other video game movie he just watched recently about racing and an ice cream truck.

 

[Tking22]

Yikes. I figured this one would be bad, just not this bad. I love the first two games, like, a lot, they were some fantastic experiences, but this is just awful, what a waste of a solid cast too. 

[Seto Kaiba]

Honestly, the worse the reviews get the more I kinda wanna actually go see it just to see how much of a dumpster fire it really is. 🤣

 

[Bolt]

I'll wait till it's streaming.  For curiosity sake. 

[Seto Kaiba]

All right, I'm gonna go behold the IMAX edition of this turdburger of a movie in person tomorrow to see if it's as bad as it's cracked up to be.

[Big s]

44 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

All right, I'm gonna go behold the IMAX edition of this turdburger of a movie in person tomorrow to see if it's as bad as it's cracked up to be.

Can’t wait for the detailed review 

[Seto Kaiba]

All righty then, I have just returned home from the 7pm showing of the IMAX edition of Borderlands at my local theatre.

 

First and foremost, I would like to remind the gentle readers out there that I know the square root of f*ck all about Borderlands lore and have never played any of the games.  The full extent of my exposure to Borderlands was watching some friends play one of the games on a Discord stream during the pandemic for an afternoon.

In the event that you are a Borderlands fan... I would like to offer my sincerest condolences, and a hug should you require it.  I cannot recommend watching this movie, because advocating self-harm is a terrible thing that I would never do.

Reviewers of Borderlands promised me a bad movie.  Some, like WhatCulture, promised me one of the worst video game movies ever committed to film.  Strong, hysterical words from a group of lifelong gamers with profound affection for the source material... but not that wide of the mark if we're being honest with each other.  Writer and director Eli Roth (The Last Exorcism, Clown, Haunt) delivered an experience almost, but not quite, entirely unlike entertainment.  This is not a "So bad it's good" movie or even a "So bad it's awful" movie.  Borderlands is "So bad it's actually pretty worrying and hard to believe anyone at Lionsgate, Gearbox Software, or 2K Games watched this movie before greenlighting it to release to theaters."  This exists on a similar level to the 1993 Super Marios Bros movie.

 

Spoiler

Borderlands cannot decide if it wants to be a sci-fi action movie or a parody of sci-fi action movies.  It spends its entire runtime refusing to pick a lane.  It wants to be taken seriously as an action movie, but it also wants to have the quirky humor and aesthetic of the 2005 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie.

Nothing illustrates this problem quite as much as the first scene of the movie where Kevin Hart's character "Roland" delivers a joke blatantly stolen from Spaceballs ("I can't breathe in this thing!") before engaging in a gunfight in a narrow corridor that is played absolutely 100% seriously without a single joke or funny moment.  

The movie's main character, Cate Blanchett's "Lilith", is clearly meant to be a badass action girl but also a key source of the movie's humor as she snarks about the events occuring in a voiceover every time there's a major scene transition.  She's clearly meant to sound like a hardened "seen it all" badass ironically and self-referentially highlighting the movie's many tropes like a snarkier Deadpool, but it's painfully unfunny and it mostly just highlights how utterly half-assed the whole movie is.  This is not helped by Jack Black's "Claptrap" also snarking about literally every event as it happens to the rest of the cast.

The cast of Borderlands includes a fair few veteran actors with decades of experience under their belts, and it is abundantly clear from their performances that they KNEW this movie was going to be a turd.  Everyone except Ariana Greenblatt ("Tina") is transparently phoning it in with varying levels of evident boredom. 

• None moreso than Jamie Lee Curtis ("Tannis") who practically sleepwalks through the film while making a vacant but slightly anxious face of a senior citizen who's just sh*t their Depends while out in public and is hoping nobody notices.
• Cate Blanchett, as the movie's main character, delivers a performance so wooden I'm not sure her face can actually move.  Rumor has it Robert Beltran and Hayden Christiansen are planning to give her some kind of award for it.  She spends practically the entire film staring into the middle distance with an expression that's clearly supposed to bring across "I'm a badass" but just makes it look like she needs corrective lenses or perhaps a nap followed by seeing her agent flogged publicly. 
• Jack Black is criminally unfunny as the robot Claptrap, seeing as he's basically just a comedy-friendly C-3PO who the rest of the cast can bully with impunity and his humor frequently veers into toilet humor territory.
• Florian Munteanu doesn't really do any acting at all here, his character "Krieg" is just along to be shirtless and masked and to say non sequiturs.  This lack of any kind of actual performance ironically makes him far and away the most likeable character.
• Ariana Greenblatt's "Tina" is an obnoxious child character and, well, she delivers an obnoxious child character but with stilted dialog and an emotionally vacant performance.
• Gina Gershon's only direction as "Mad Moxxi" was clearly just "Your character is some kind of old west brothel's madam but in clown makeup", and between her very stilted delivery and unwise makeup and wardrobe choices she reminded me of nothing so much as that time Willem Dafoe dressed in drag for Boondock Saints... which helps, as it reminds me of a movie I'd much rather be watching!
• Edgar Ramirez's role as the movie's villain "Deucalion Atlas" is perhaps the third-worst in the entire film behind Jamie Lee Curtis and Cate Blanchett's... he's trying to be a smug Tony Stark sort of villain techbro CEO, but he just sounds bored and uninterested despite supposedly being obsessed with the Vault.
• Janina Gavankar as Atlas's right-hand woman "Knoxx" is also trying to do a smug corporate goon sort of role, but it's undercut by her character's sh*tty haircut and makeup that makes her look like the Leeloo you got on Wish.com and a lack of any meaningful dialog.

For some reason, every female character except Knoxx seems to have to have their cleavage on display.  Honestly, my nomination for best supporting actress in this film is that terribly hardworking pushup bra they put on Cate Blanchett that's trying, with assistance from makeup, to make it look like she's working with a lot more than she's got.  Apparently nobody told Eli Roth that he can just cast a busty actress if he wants to.  She has to spend SO MUCH TIME in unnatural looking "action girl" poses to emphasize her figure throughout the film too.  It must have been terribly uncomfortable for her.

 

Spoiler

The movie's plot sees "Roland" bust "Tina" out of prison(?) for some unspecified reason, acquiring a Psycho named "Krieg" along the way for no clear reason.

Deucalion Atlas interrupts Lilith's attempt to deliver a bounty head to make her a luducrously extravagant offer to recover his missing daughter "Tina" from the planet Pandora.  Lilith goes to Pandora aboard a shitty pod thingy and runs into Claptrap immediately, spends about 1/3 of the movie just roaming around Pandora looking to find Tina before discovering her one of the many junkyards that seem to be Pandora's only actual terrain feature.  A brief fight ensues where Tina chucks preposterous amounts of explosives that somehow fail to do more than mildly annoy anyone (a problem that persists throughout the film).  After being attacked by Atlas's private army, Lilith joins up with Roland, Tina, and Krieg to run away from them and in the process learns that Tina is a designer clone made with alien DNA to be the key to the Vault.  

So they go see Dr. Tannis, who tells them the second Vault key they need is in a mine full of toxic corrosive ooze and insane psychos, they sneak in by using Claptrap as a diversion, get caught while trying to escape, and Roland "dies" while the rest escape up an elevator where Tina conveniently displays the ability to teleport for some reason.  Atlas catches up to them via a drone to try and persuade Lilith to deliver the girl to him, and then Tina believes she's betrayed them and tries to kill her with a grenade that only really musses up her over-moussed hair.  

They go to the Vault, which is conveniently like, walking distance from where they were, and Tina tries to unlock it only to discover she can't.  Atlas jumpscares them with a huge army he was hiding behind a hologram and Lilith reveals SHE'S the real alien baby who can activate the Vault.  She activates it, and the movie briefly becomes a sh*tty ripoff of X-Men because it gives her superpowers that manifest as wings of fire, terrible CG of her "flying", and the ability to shoot beams.  She gives the other members of her party godmode and they kill a bunch of the enemy soldiers until their gunship takes her out, then she gets back up and takes down the gunship in a DBZ-style beam clash, killing the rest of the enemy army except for Atlas.  Atlas takes Tina prisoner, forcing Lilith to let him into the Vault where the aliens stored all their knowledge and tech.  The inside of the vault is just a cave with Tron lines everywhere and a bunch of floating cubes.  She does some teleport taunting of him before rescuing Tina and leaving him to be killed by some kind of eldrich horror lurking in a pit in the vault that drags him into the darkness with tentacles.

Then they just go back to the city and the city throws a huge party because somehow peace is restored because of all of this?  The film ends with Lilith flying up into the sky to make a shitty "firebird" motif out of fire.

Honestly, almost as detrimental to the writing is the shoddy effects work here.  

It's not just Atlas's offbrand Stormtroopers who do look a lot like Dark Helmet from Spaceballs after a run-in with a can of gloss red spraypaint.  The various sci-fi guns look cheap and plasticky.  The costumes look cheap and pleather-y, with many of the background characters looking like they nicked their costumes from extras working on The Mandalorian, Furiosa, or Fallout.  There's one car that looks mildly sci-fi but it's clearly a greenscreened-in prop and the others are all clearly just modern Jeeps and SUVs with crap glued to them to give them a vaguely sci-fi veneer.  It's clear most of the film was shot in front of a green screen.  ESPECIALLY the many scenes of the cast walking on narrow ledges.  There's a lot of terrible uncanny valley stunt CG, especally in the film's climax where Lilth taps into the Temu-brand Phoenix Force and becomes a superhero.  

The fight choreography is almost passable, except the film can't seem to make up its mind if getting shot actually hurts a person or just makes them fall down.  Krieg has a massive axe thing that can bisect people, but somehow that's almost bloodless carnage.  The big fight scene inside the mine where the second Vault key is is a mess of shakycam, fast cuts, and actors who clearly have very little idea of how to hold a gun.  Lilith in particular is a supreme offender as she seems to feel compelled to twirl her pistols between shots for no reason.

The visual effects for the Vault are perhaps the movie's biggest VFX letdown, since we were promised incredible alien technology and wealth beyond measure... and it's a black room covered in blue-white Tron lines decorated by the occasional cones of CG cubes floating in beams of light.  It looks like a sh*tty effect from Red Dwarf, and it's where the movie's plot effectively ends with the villain being pulled offscreen by some badly CG'd tentacles from an unseen monster.

 

In summation, Borderlands is a VERY bad movie and it is VERY obvious that everyone involved (except possibly Eli Roth) understood that it was a VERY bad movie while principal photography was still underway.  It is, in a way, fitting that there's a scene where the four main characters literally get sh*t on because that's what this movie did to the actors and audience alike.

How this film got green-lit for release in this state is a mystery for the ages.  I refuse to believe that this movie was subjected to any kind of test screening, because I still have just enough faith in Humanity to believe that no Human audience watched this and said "Yeah, that's a good time".  Especially not the IP owner (Gearbox), the game's publisher (2K), or the distributor (Lionsgate).

[Big s]

Still sounds better than the House of the dead movie 

[JB0]

9 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

one of the many junkyards that seem to be Pandora's only actual terrain feature

That at least sounds true to the games...

 

Yeah, this looked like an atomic dumpster inferno from very early on. Sad to see it happen. If only Warner had been making this, they could've cancelled it for the tax writeoff and spared everyone the suffer ring.

[Seto Kaiba]

11 hours ago, Big s said:

Still sounds better than the House of the dead movie 

Hm... I dunno.  

Uwe Boll's House of the Dead is undeniably a bad movie.  That said, I'd argue it has more to offer in terms of sincere entertainment value because the people working on it clearly understood the assignment.  They knew they were working on a video game adaptation of an infamously campy, low-quality, arcade cabinet rail shooter with an excuse plot for a story.  So they had fun with it by making it campy, over-the-top, schlocky zombie killing mindless fun.  It's bad, but it's bad in a way that's fun to both watch and poke fun at.

Eli Roth's Borderlands is also undeniably a bad movie.  However, Borderlands is a bad movie that takes itself completely seriously.  As I understand it, Borderlands the games are somewhat campy looter-shooters full of goofy, over-the-top characters and lots of comedic sociopathy.  There's no such sense of fun to Borderlands the movie.  The characters, excl. Tina and Claptrap, conduct themselves with grim seriousness at all times as they chase the poorly explained macguffin that is the Vault Key (which resembles nothing so much as a bedazzled buttplug) and then the Vault itself.  That puts them heavily at odds with the movie's visual design, which is brightly colored and vaguely cartoony in almost every scene.  That it takes itself so seriously despite how it looks is what really kills any "so bad it's good" entertainment value it might've had as a result of the awful writing, the terrible performances, and the mediocre digital effects work.

If I were asked to pick which movie I considered more fun to watch... sorry, it'd be House of the Dead all the way.

 

TBH, one thing that really doesn't help Borderlands is that Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, and Jamie Lee Curtis are all about 20-30 years too old to be in this kind of movie.  It's not just that they're all clearly bored to tears working on this project, it's that they look absolutely terrible doing it.  Kevin Hart looks very out of place trying to play a badass soldier.  Jamie Lee Curtis somehow manages to look even older than her 65 years, possibly because her delivery comes off as senile 90% of the time.  Cate Blanchett gets it the worst, though.  The flame-red wig, the tight outfit, and the very heavy makeup intended to make her look young and sexy and athletic just make her look like a 50-something cougar trying way too hard to look young.  IMAX resolution is not her friend here.  They could've just cast some fresh-outs in their early 20's and the whole thing would've looked a lot more natural, and cost quite a bit less too.

 

5 hours ago, JB0 said:

That at least sounds true to the games...

... huh, I'm honestly not sure what that says about the games.

 

5 hours ago, JB0 said:

Yeah, this looked like an atomic dumpster inferno from very early on. Sad to see it happen. If only Warner had been making this, they could've cancelled it for the tax writeoff and spared everyone the suffer ring.

Yeah, this is definitely one that would've been better off dying in development hell.

[Big s]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

If I were asked to pick which movie I considered more fun to watch... sorry, it'd be House of the Dead all the way.

That’s really bad. I’ve only watched house of the dead once and my friends and I sometimes have a lot of fun with bad movies, but house of the dead was infuriating to all of us. People were walking out of the theater for refunds and that was one of the first times I’d ever seen that happen to a large crowd.
It really came down to the action scenes being non existent. Like they didn’t have a budget or didn’t care to film them at all and just cut to some kid playing the arcade game anytime a zombie got in someone’s face. I think people would have been less angry at it though if they hadn’t cheated out that bad. I probably would’ve disliked it, but I wouldn’t have anger for the film if they had just had something there. It’s one of the very few times a movie has actually angered me. I still think of that as the absolute worst movie I’ve ever seen, and it makes Redneck Zombies feel like an Oscar winner

[danth]

I watched it in a group of four people, and nobody thought it was good, but nobody thought it was as horrible as the comments in this thread would have you believe.

Simply, not enough happened, none of the character relationships were compelling, only maybe two moments/lines were at all funny. I wouldn't say I was bored, but I definitely never felt excited or invested in anything happening. JLC was definitely underutilized. Blanchett's hair was distractingly cosplayish.

Nothing was super cringe though. The world definitely felt like borderlands to me. But I was still left unsatisfied.