Borderlands’ failure can easily be summed up by two things: its box office performance and its critical reactions. After coming out on August 9th, both of these metrics are looking less than stellar. So far, Borderlands has made approximately $1.3 million at the box office in its opening days. This is a dismal failure considering the movie’s significant $110-120 million budget. While there is definitely still time for Borderlands to make more money, this is not a very auspicious start. Furthermore, Borderlands’ box office may not improve by very much considering that reviews for Borderlands have been shockingly bad.
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An aspect of Borderlands that could have had an effect on its success was its complicated development. The movie was released in 2024, but it was originally announced almost a decade ago, in 2015. In that time, Borderlands went through various different hands, especially in terms of screenwriters. All in all, Borderlands had about seven different screenwriters over the course of its development. Ultimately, that lack of stability could have been the reason why Borderlands felt so lifeless once it hit the big screen. After going through so many iterations, the story had the life sucked out of it.
Another problem is the overabundance of story that Borderlands has. If Borderlands was intended to be the first in a film franchise, there wasn’t much reason to stuff in as much of the various video games as possible. There would have been time to get to those parts. However, director Eli Roth told Dexerto, “It was hard to streamline it, you know, I’m trying to throw in absolutely everything I can into the movie.” It seems as though this only served to hurt the movie, as audiences are most concerned with accuracy when it comes to adaptations.
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In the end, this is a tough situation for Borderlands fans. The franchise had the potential to be something great, but after so many delays and development changes, the movie ended up taking a turn for the worse. Perhaps if the project had fallen into different hands, it would have been better. Maybe there is a chance that this could happen someday in the form of a reboot television series. However, for now, Borderlands has given everything it has and must suffer the consequences.
A friend gave me a free ticket to watch it yesterday.
I didn’t have anything better to do so I figured sure why not free movie can’t complain.
Here’s my list of the reasons why that movie was not good.
One, there was no reason to care for the main character.
All we know is that she’s a bounty hunter and she wants money. There was not enough motivation for me to get invested.
And, this sounds bad, but Cate Blanchett was too old for the part. She looks like she’s 50 years old but she has the athleticism of 17-year-old Olympic gymnast. At the very least explain that she has some like cyborg implants that lets her do these things despite her age or something.
I mean, in action movies with hulked out steroidal muscle guys, at least it makes sense for them to be so unbelievably strong. For her nothing about her other than her haircut implies that she has the ability to do the things that she’s doing.
Two, there was no reason to care for any of the side characters.
Kevin Hart’s character seems like he had an interesting backstory that could have easily been built on and made him a much more dynamic character and instead we got nothing.
Claptrap was just there. Like programmed by some mysterious prophecy thing that was never really explained and somehow invulnerable and yet terrified and annoying with always wanting the main character to die so it can just fuck off somewhere.
The psycho seems like he could be a cool character but he was literally just muscle. No depth to him whatsoever, not even a reason why he’s a psycho nothing just a giant walking pile of muscle and terrible one-liners out of the blue.
And I love Jamie Lee Curtis, she’s an amazing actress, but somebody needed to teach her how to respond to a green screen. Having a blank and bewildered look on her face with her eyes not tracking with everybody else’s eyes was so distracting. Her character was an exposition character and she never exposed the information that was going on to the main character or the audience.
Had she not been in the movie nothing would have changed about the movie. That’s bad.
Tiny Tina seemed like she could be an interesting character, they tried to develop her story a little bit but she never did anything for her own sake. She just acted like she was immune and impervious and there to have fun and therefore it’s really hard to care for her. It would have been sad had she died, but that was the extent of my care for her.
The villain was a rote villain. Atlas just has money and power and doesn’t care about anybody who works for him and lets everybody die left and right without even blinking. Even when the leader guard turned on him to protect Kevin Hart he just immediately zapped her with his remote controlled spaceship laser cannon and nobody really reacted to that they were just like, “Ahh! No!” and then went right back to fighting each other.
They even pulled out this like gigantic dude with a mace and could have had some sort of epic battle between him and psycho and instead he just kind of got knocked into a hole.
The big twist at the end was so fucking telegraphed that I saw it coming 25 minutes before it actually hit the screen.
And then the action scenes, which this is an action movie and most of it were action events, were so tropey, to whit:
Elite killer squads who can’t aim for shit
Elite good guys that can destroy anybody with a quick shot over their shoulder without even thinking about it
A cave full of super psychos that make the regular psychos piss their pants that just die as soon as you blink at them too hard
All of the main characters had plot armor so thick that Kevin Hart could be buried under a pile of exploding poison caustic filled psycho people and walk away with a cheesy ass one-liner like, “that was the worst orgy I’ve ever been to”
It’s still not the worst movie I’ve ever seen, but it’s right next to it.
0 stars, don’t watch.
Some true borderlands friends of mine are going to watch it in discord together and get way too high while we roast it. Cheers for the heads up.
One thing that really pissed me off about the movie is that at one point they’re walking across an iron crosswalk over a caustic pit of stuff that dissolves everything and the 72 lb soaking wet tiny Tina jumps on it in a piece of it breaks off almost immediately.
Okay, fair, so what do the rest of the characters do? The 300 lb 7 ft tall psycho guy and everyone else?
They all stand right next to each other and put all of their weight on it at the exact same time.
This is the kind of shit that just isn’t believable. That these battle-hardened space pirate action heroes would do something so stupid is just a perfect representation of the entire fucking movie for me.