Borderlands
This post was published on 8/8 and republished on 8/10.
I’m not sure I knew of anyone, Borderlands fan or not, who believed that the movie adaptation of the game was going to be good, based on everything from casting to trailers. Now as reviews come in ahead of its release tomorrow, those fears have been validated. And then some.
As I write this, the Borderlands movie has a flat 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. No positive reviews whatsoever (Update: A single positive review has come in raising it to a 3%), and the ones that are in are not just negative, but brutal. Here’s a sampling:
- Discussing Film: “The fans deserve a lot better than whatever director Eli Roth is trying to do with Borderlands. This is the video game movie curse at its worst.”
- Men’s Journal: “If Borderlands doesn’t stop studio executives from salivating at the sight of every single IP that comes across their desks, nothing will.”
- Next Best Picture: “It’s impressive how Roth can elicit the poor quality of 2000s video game adaptation energy yet somehow forget the discernable sense of fun or style that made even those terrible movies stand out.”
- IGN: “Borderlands is an abysmal waste of a beloved franchise that takes a kooky band of murderous misfits and drains the life out of their first adventure together.”
Borderlands
It’s true there are not many reviews in yet, and the score may tick up, but everything I’ve seen outside of some video game influencers who attended premieres (or are literally extras in the movie) has been relentlessly negative, and I would be surprised to find more than a handful of positive reviews come in when all is said and done. If any.
A 0% on Rotten Tomatoes is of course as low as you can go. If we are looking at the worst-scored video game movies ever made, that list would now be (Updated list with the 4%):
- Alone in the Dark (2005) – 1%
- Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (2009) – 3%
- House of the Dead (2003) – 3%
- Borderlands (2024) – 3%
- In the Name of the King (2007) – 4%
- Bloodrayne (2005) – 4%
- Mortal Kombat Annihilation- 4%
- Silent Hill Revelation (2012) – 8%
- Hitman Agent: 47 (2015) – 8%
- Postal (2007) – 9%
I put the year there so you can see that most of these ultra-terrible ones are in a decade or so when making a good video game adaptation was borderline impossible and the only people trying were directors like Uwe Boll half the time. As of late, we have seen very solid live action video game adaptations on both film (Sonic) and TV (The Last of Us, Fallout), and Borderlands seems to be a 10-15 year step backward.
I do expect it to rise above a zero percent. There are so many critics on Rotten Tomatoes of questionable quality and taste that probably someone will like it and knock it above some of these (I am one of those critics, so no judgement), but that has not happened at the time of this writing.
Who saw this coming? Everyone. Everyone did. And here we are.
Update (8/10): We have 92 reviews in now, and Borderlands has gone from 0% to 3% to now settling at around 10%. This puts it outside much higher on the “worst video game adaptations ever” list, which would now look like
- Alone in the Dark (2005) – 1%
- Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (2009) – 3%
- House of the Dead (2003) – 3%
- In the Name of the King (2007) – 4%
- Bloodrayne (2005) – 4%
- Mortal Kombat Annihilation- 4%
- Silent Hill Revelation (2012) – 8%
- Hitman Agent: 47 (2015) – 8%
- Postal (2007) – 9%
- Borderlands (2024) – 10%
Of course there is absolutely no pretending a 10% is good. I do agree, however, that it does not deserve to be quite as low as that terrible decade of Uwe Boll movies and a few other very poor ones. Like no, this is definitely not on par with Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li.
I have indeed now seen the movie myself, and a 10% is something I can get behind. My own negative review is now on Rotten Tomatoes, and here’s an excerpt:
“This is neither a good Borderlands movie or nor a good movie, period. It feels like Gearbox and Eli Roth tried to split the difference here, making a mass-appeal PG-13 action film but gesturing vaguely at the games to try to get that crowd to show up too.
But the end result is throwing the Borderlands games at a wall, watching them shatter, and gluing back together a handful of mildly recognizable pieces.”
I said in the piece that the casting of Kevin Hart and Cate Blanchett are big problems, as expected. Hart mostly acts like a barely toned-down version of his usual self, and is nothing like game Roland. Blanchett is of course normally a great actress but a 30 year or so age increase from Lilith is bizarre, and also makes no sense within the confines of the film as actresses close to her age appear to remember her as a child.
This is a franchise killer. Gearbox had big plans for a Borderlands cinematic universe that is clearly going nowhere after this. And given how this went, that is fully justified.
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