I Don’t Totally Hate the Awful Borderlands Movie
We all knew that Borderlands: The Movie was in trouble from the beginning, right? It spent years and years in development. It had multiple rewrites. It went through re-shoots two years after filming with a different director at the helm. And it has a cast that makes little sense no matter what angle you look at it from. All of this on top of the notorious challenge of making a video game movie, and in an era where it has to compete with great new examples from the the TV world like Fallout and The Last of Us.
If this thing had come out closer to its original 2021 shooting schedule, and with its originally planned R-rating, maybe it wouldn’t have been a total disaster. Maybe you would have said “huh that was a little bland” and gone on with your day. But with the weight of all the extra time and attention and the moved goalposts of recent comparable projects, Borderlands was doomed from the start.
It doesn’t help that there isn’t a ton of plot to actually adapt in the original 2009 game that this film is most heavily based on. It tells a stripped down version of an already threadbare game, with characters and elements from its own sequels sprinkled on top for no readily apparent reason. It isn’t at all a shock that Last of Us’s…
