It’s somewhat silly to admit this, but I think it needs to be said: I, for whatever reason, root pretty hard for Eli Roth. Sure, the guy’s not an overwhelming underdog – he’s made pretty decent movies in the studio system, he’s probably the most handsome man ever to direct a horror picture, and if all else fails, he can hit the convention circuit as the Bear Jew and probably make a killing – but for whatever reason, he’s become synonymous with tripe. I don’t think that’s fair. The Hostel movies were gross yet insightful, acting as role reversals of real-world power dynamics in the ‘00s, standing apart from “torture porn” proper due to their willingness to engage with the real in a way that, say, the Saw movies wouldn’t until some producer saw Michael Moore’s Sicko. His 2010s were, well, less successful – The Green Inferno was a back-to-basics return from the world of producing that tried to capture the appeal of the Mondo cannibalism pictures and missed the mark, his remake of Death Wish was dead in the water, and The House With the Clock In Its Walls was a solid picture that finally found something his typical audience was grossed out by: PG horror. But the ‘20s, at least so far, had been good to him: he made a decent documentary debut with Fin, a true-blue green horror film about endangered sharks, and returned to proper gory form with Thanksgiving, which was as nasty as hinted at when it was first teased as a fake trailer during the Tarantino/Rodriguez double-feature Grindhouse (and a particularly funny bit of Masshole Americana, as well). But his latest film, Borderlands, is hard to defend, even for someone who has a soft spot for him.
Let’s be fully real: This movie most likely never should have been made. The Borderlands games aren’t exactly narrative-rich in the way that, say, Fallout or The Last of Us are (and it is becoming fully clear that the optimal medium for video game adaptations is TV, which allows for a facsimile of the laconic exploration that one does in a video game world). Sure, it is a successful IP, and the games have made plenty of money for 2K and Gearbox, the publisher and developer of the titles. But the story of the mainline games – “mainline” provides a carveout for Tales of the Borderlands, the Telltale choose-your-own-adventure visual novels that placed a premium on narrative freedom as opposed to exploration – has never been particularly compelling, fusing sci-fi cliché, tired pop culture references, and a ceaseless amount of eight grader humor to form something that players typically ignore in favor of what the titles do well: gunplay. The Borderlands games are compelling because they accommodate many different playstyles (fitting for a game that’s primarily a multiplayer experience) and the creative care that Gearbox puts into designing the weapons. Sure, many of them are procedurally generated (meaning they have randomized attributes), but they’re often fun and funny, especially when properly designed. How about a rifle that fucking screams – as in high-pitched human wails – when you shoot it? Or how about a gun that shoots… guns? Or a grenade launcher that fires explosive hamburgers at your targets? It’s shit that makes you and your dumb buddies laugh in the dorm common room in between bong hits and fistfuls of Doritos, and Gearbox has exploited that lane better than almost any other non-Halo, COD, or sports title.
What, then, does one make of a Borderlands movie that doesn’t spend practically any time highlighting this key bit of color – a potential gold mine for goofy action cinema – and instead doubles down on the game’s worst assets? I wasn’t kidding about the massive amounts of clichés, either. Here’s an annotated plot synopsis for you: Centuries ago, a creator alien race that disappeared (Alien, Planet of the Vampires, and a thousand other titles) left behind a vault full of mysterious things (treasure Macguffin of a thousand faces) on a desert world (A Princess of Mars, Dune, Star Wars) called Pandora (This one isn’t an Avatar reference, given that the first game came out just before James Cameron’s movie did, but it is a proper allusion to Greek myth). We open with a daring rescue, in which a helmeted soldier named Roland (Kevin Hart) rescues Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), the daughter of a powerful evildoer, from a space prison (Star Wars). She holds the key to entering this mystical place in her DNA (…Mission to Mars?), and, as such, a whole lot of people want her for her powers.
Her dad, Atlas (Edgar Ramierez), hires a bounty hunter named Lilith (Cate Blanchett) to track her down and bring her back to him (pick your preferred Western here). Lilith, a character cast from the Han Solo mold, resents children and especially hates Pandora, having grown up there and witnessed a certain amount of tragedy in her childhood, so she’s not exactly stoked to be on babysitting duty. She lands on the planet, finds a sarcastic robot named Claptrap (Jack Black), and is mistaken for a Vault Hunter (Fallout), one of the many treasure hunters on the planet who are searching for the Vault themselves. Eventually, she’ll run into Roland, Tina, a crazed former psycho named Kreig, and their scientist pal (Jamie Lee Curtis), and go on an adventure full of vehicles and chaos in a post-apocalyptic landscape (Mad Max) before discovering that she, Lilith, might have more to do with the real thrust of the story than originally hinted at.
Roth’s been set up for failure here: not only is there not enough space to do the kind of R-rated riffing that the games do (I distinctly remember in the first game encountering a villain called “Mad Mel,” who drives a black car and hurls bullets and Australian-accented insults at you), but the action is almost fully inert. You’d think a studio like Lionsgate would put a premium on gunplay after releasing the John Wick movies. Still, Roth doesn’t really have any interest in that level of action absurdity or innovation, with the set-pieces being dumb echoes of other, better films. Nor is he allowed to translate his cast’s strengths into assets: Hart’s a straight man, Blanchett is exhausted and unhappy to be there, and any of the characters meant to spout “random” goofy bullshit say their lines through clenched teeth.
The one exception to this is Black, who, I guess by virtue of having played the games and being a voice-over-only role, is able to find the sweet spot and give a few sensible chuckles to the humor-starved crowd. The problem is, he’s playing a character that 90 percent of the audience familiar with the games hates because of how annoying they are. If there’s any aspect of this that’s worth praising, it’s that Roth and his team did a decent job of translating the world of the games to the screen, for whatever cachet that kind of fidelity to the source might have with the seven gamers who will pay to see this on opening weekend. The costume design translates the looks of the characters from the small screen to the big, with Blanchett looking especially striking as Lilith – fiery red hair, Han Solo holster belts, tiny leather jackets – but the world is so dull, lifeless, and full of echoes that it might as well just be a ninety-minute walk through a dark cave.
Everything about Borderlands is just boring when it’s not too busy annoying the shit out of you. Make no mistake, the games are the same way in style and tone, but there’s a key aspect that’s often forgotten about in video game adaptations that is frankly hard to translate to the screen. It’s interactivity, the tragic flaw of most video game movies that aren’t just direct adaptations of plot-heavy games (something like The Last of Us wants to be a regular show or movie, regardless of how good it might be as a game). It’s not like there haven’t been good adaptations, though – Fallout does a good job of translating a player narrative to screen while also sort of acknowledging that the stylish world is as much of a draw as any aspect of the story – but we’re sort of trapped in a period much like the comic-book movie was in the ‘90s or mid-aughts, where filmmakers are either too faithful or throw too much good shit out to get the feeling right.
The Fallout approach of a parallel narrative feels like the optimal one, with an original story that compliments, not replicates beat-for-beat, the experience that one has when playing the games. One can be aesthetically faithful and preserve the appeal of these narratives as visual experiences without being chapter-and-verse faithful to a threadbare story and its lifeless characters. Roth was always a bad choice for this kind of film, given that, regardless of what you might think of him, he has personality, and in the battle between the media world’s nouveau riche – the video game industry – and the money men have with the filmmaker, it was always going to result in him having to submit to the needs of the various stakeholders involved.
What you get is a soulless product that looks good during a shareholder presentation but will inevitably fail to capture an audience once it’s dropped into the wilds of public opinion. This won’t be the last of these failures – Nintendo still has plenty to put on screen, after all – but one can hope that someone will eventually realize that faithfulness is overrated when it comes to taking the controller out of a player’s hand and making them pay attention to what’s on screen.