Borderlands Was Never Going To Be A Good Movie
If you’ve been following along with film and television news in the last few weeks then you’re surely aware of the recently released Borderlands movie. The film, which premiered on August 9, was immediately panned by critics and general audiences alike, and currently touts a measly 10 percent critic score on Rotten Tomatoes. While this may come as a major shock to some die-hard gamers, many of us could have easily predicted this outcome, as the Borderlands games have way too massive a scope to be adequately portrayed in a single film.
Too Huge To Adapt
For those who don’t know, the Borderlands movie was written and directed by Eli Roth, after languishing in various stages of development hell since 2011.
The film, which adapts the first-person shooter of the same name released by Gearbox Software, was essentially doomed from the very beginning, as it took on the task of adapting a massive story and condensing it into an hour and a half.
Incredibly Long Games
Anyone who has ever played a Borderlands game knows that the story of just one game can take upwards of a dozen hours to unfold, with some important details left to nontraditional means of cinematic storytelling, such as item descriptions and side-quests.
A Series Would Have Worked Better
Personally, I feel that this problem could have been curtailed had the team behind the Borderlands movie simply pivoted to create a long-form television series instead.
The easiest path to doing the franchise justice would be to take a page from recent critically-lauded adaptations such as HBO’s The Last of Us and Amazon Prime’s Fallout, and stretch the story over multiple episodes, totaling significantly more screen time than a feature length film.
Despite a few recent success stories such as The Super Mario Bros. Movie, films based on video games have a reputation for being cursed, with dozens of installments over the years serving as major disappointments.
It Worked For Other Series
This chain of negative critical reactions seems to have been all but nullified by The Last of Us, Fallout, and even Netflix’s Arcane, though the Borderlands movie was already in full swing by the time those projects arrived.
Still, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see how a Borderlands television series could have perfectly paced out the major plot points of the games with ease, or even offered a standalone anthology tale based in the overall universe of the Borderlands franchise, with no direct ties to any existing characters.
They Need To Learn
Instead, the film that we got attempted to cram a hundred hours of high-octane gameplay and artillery-assisted insanity into a single PG-13 adventure, which would be nearly impossible to do right. While the film is aided by a star-studded cast of excellent performers such as Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Jamie Lee Curtis, and many more, they just weren’t given enough material to shine in their respective roles.
It’s unfortunate that studios seem to be incapable of learning this lesson, but if the Borderlands movie makes anything clear, it’s that video game adaptations for projects of this scope are almost always doomed to failure.
