It’s going to take some extra effort, but after multiple delays, the Borderlands movie is finally entering a whole new ecosystem of video game adaptations, one where we no longer expect them to all automatically be bad. Nonetheless, some of them will It’s still bad – a bad movie is a bad movie, regardless of its origins. Unfortunately, Borderlands is one such example. But Borderlands isn’t terrible because it’s a video game movie – a big part of the problem is actually how far it strays from the game’s baseline to create an experience that’s more generic than it should be.
WARNING: This article will contain multiple major spoilers for the Borderlands movie, including details of its ending, and comparisons to the game’s plot.
Beyond the costumes worn by the characters, the movie version of Borderlands — both in terms of the overall experience and the specific story — is fundamentally different from the game in many ways. Oddly enough, it’s humorless and a completely gore-free PG-13 affair – until I got used to the lack of gore, the action felt unfinished because of it.
But the more substantial change is in how the movie remixes the game’s plot and omits some major characters. The central idea is the same: somewhere in the wasteland of Pandora, there is an ancient treasure trove filled with technology left behind by the extinct alien pioneer race the Bowuians, and people want to find it and get into it. But other than that, everything is at least slightly different, and mostly different extremely Different.
The central plot is that the head of the Atlas Corporation, referred to throughout the film simply as Atlas (Bob Atlas?), creates his own from the blood of some ancient aliens he found “Daughter” little Tina, she should be the key to survival. But she was freed from captivity by Roland, a soldier of Atlas who took her to Pandora. So Atlas hired Lilith to go to her home planet Pandora to hunt down Roland and bring back Tina.
This isn’t actually in-game material. Atlas the guy is the original creator of the movie – Handsome Jack is never mentioned in the movie, he’s the game character who feels the closest because of the “villain with a magical daughter” thing, even though he obviously He also plays Commander Steele, the main villain of “Borderlands 1”. There really isn’t a perfect analogy for him. Likewise, little Tina in the game isn’t a magical clone, her parents are dead, and Lilith isn’t from Pandora.
Ultimately, we end up with a core team of four characters, just like in the game, including Roland, Lilith, Tiny Tina, and Krieg (a psychopath who was one of Borderlands 2’s DLC player characters) – Mordechai and Brick, another Borderlands 1 player-character, are nowhere to be found. Teaming up with scientist Patricia Tannis, the team searches for the two physical keys to the vault and their locations, racing Atlas to find the vault first. They try to open the vault with the key and little Tina, but fail – apparently she misplaced the key. The correct key is Lilith, who climactically learns that she is a secret siren with unimaginable ancient powers—the power necessary to open the vault. In the games, sirens and ereds are different types of creatures, but the movie conflates them, treating Lilith as the bloodline heir to the ered legacy. It’s a bit weird to use as an ending twist, since Sirens are Lilith’s game class, and you use her Siren powers throughout the game.
So, after a big CGI battle between our heroes and Atlas’s army of bad guys, both Lilith and Atlas end up in the vault, with Atlas holding Tina hostage at gunpoint . But soon after, the tentacled creatures (the Destroyers) inhabiting the vault are revealed, and Lilith frees Tina and escapes. Atlas was dragged away, presumably dead. The good guys hug each other and celebrate, Lilith puts on a magical fireworks show, and no one talks about the contents of the vault.
Of course, in the game, what’s in the vault is the final boss fight. It’s an extradimensional being known as the Destroyer, which if released would eventually devour the entire universe – and Eridians died trying to seal it away in their vaults many eons ago. When you reach the end of the game, you chase Commander Steele and her soldiers into the shelter, only to watch as they are immediately slaughtered by the monster – which you then have to fight to stop it from escaping the shelter as it Already unlocked. But in the movie, they just let it eat Mr. Atlas and leave.
Does the Borderland movie have a post-credits or post-credits scene?
There’s also a brief bonus sequence – “scene” is too strong a word – in which Jack Black’s claptrap dances in front of a black background and says a bunch of stupid things. For the sake of your mental and emotional health, it is best to leave the theater before this part.
Borderlands is in theaters now.
