He Borderlands Film, which was released in theaters 21 days ago, Now available to watch at home via video on demand. This three-week wait time could be an indicator of the poor box office performance Along with his poor critical receptionAfter seeing it for myself, I agree that it's not the best example of a video game movie. However, I also saw moments where the movie took its source material and remixed it into something entertaining. Whether you watch this movie in the theater, at home, or not at all, Borderlands He deserves your respect.
Part of that is because, honestly, the movie is not… that Bad. It's visually stunning, with gorgeous style and action sequences that were actually intelligible rather than greasy-looking blobs of CGI. It has a classic found-family/magic MacGuffin plot that manages to say something interesting about the whole “chosen one” trope.
Cate Blanchett stars as Lilith, a bounty hunter who travels to the planet Pandora to rescue a young girl named Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) from the clutches of Roland, a Crimson Spear soldier gone rogue (Kevin Hart), and his psychopathic accomplice (description from the film, not mine) Krieg (Florian Munteanu). Lilith discovers that Tina went willingly with her captors, and with the help of the robot Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black) and the expertise of Dr. Patricia Tanis (Jamie Lee Curtis), Lilith decides to help Tina acquire a powerful artifact in order to keep it out of the hands of her filthy rich father, Deukalian Atlas (Edgar Ramirez), CEO of Atlas Corporation.
“(Borderlands) is not a video game movie.”
Pandora is a hostile desert planet, ruined by huge amounts of waste from its human and natural inhabitants. If the film If the trends currently dominating television and film were to be followed, the planet would appear dark even during the day, and everything would be covered in the sickly orange filter that Hollywood uses whenever there is a movie set in a desert. Looking at you, DuneInstead, the locations and characters are carefully designed (and properly lit, go figure!), resulting in a visually pleasing film to watch.
I was extremely surprised by how good Cate Blanchett looked as Lilith. With her bright orange hair and shiny dark blue jacket, Blanchett looked like she stepped straight out of the first film. Borderlands When Lilith made her first appearance, I turned to my husband and commented that it was the most video game-like movie I'd ever seen (how sweet!). Everything else, from the rest of the cast to the props and sets, matched that visual energy without seeming cartoonish or fake.
BorderlandsFor better or worse, it eschewed some of the typical conventions of making a video game movie. There's usually some moment in these kinds of movies that works as a nod to its parent. The first-person action sequence in Condemn or the Rainbow Road race in The Super Mario Bros. movie comes to mind.
In an interview with Randy Pitchford, creator of the Borderlands I asked the executive producer of the film and games how he blurred the line between the game and the movie. “We didn’t do any of that,” Pitchford replied. “I hate that shit.”
According to Pitchford, there were originally plans to make it the film's easter egg for fans of the game, but seeing another video game movie made him change his mind.
“We didn’t do any of that. I hate that shit.”
“I voice a character in the games called Mad Count“And I was in makeup for five hours to become Crazy Earl,” he said. Pitchford said he filmed scenes for the movie, but changed his mind after seeing the moment in Unexplored when Mark Wahlberg and Tom Holland happen to meet Nolan North, the voice actor who plays Nathan Drake in the games.
“There were two problems with that,” he said. “If you know who it is, you’re immediately taken out of the universe. And if you don’t know, none of it makes sense. It’s completely inconsistent with the story, so I asked them to cut me out of the movie.”
According to Pitchford, Borderlands “It’s not a video game movie,” he says, but rather a film that incorporates the characters, themes and stories of the first game, which have been greatly enhanced thanks to the standout performances of Blanchett and Greenblatt.
Lilith and Tina get along well. Neither of them have a loving family and are so desperate for one that they cling to anyone who crosses their path. Tina immediately adopts Kreig as her older brother and bodyguard. And even though Claptrap and Lilith hate each other, they still work well together.
However, the dialogue did not work so well. Let us not fool ourselves: Borderlands It's not funny. Its style of irreverent humor and stream-of-consciousness dialogue stopped being entertaining at the time. Tales from the Borderlands It came out in 2014. Hearing Kevin Hart say with a straight face, “It's pee. I have pee in the middle of my truck now,” I turned white on the armrests to keep from scratching my eyes.
The film also didn't make good use of its cast. Take Dr. Patricia Tanis for example. In the film, she's just a vehicle to exposition the plot, but she could have been so much more. According to Tanis' actress, Jamie Lee Curtis, she got into the role of the lonely, socially awkward doctor and her attraction to inanimate objects, but that didn't make it into the final film.
“The idea of objectified sexuality, the idea of an isolated person who falls in love with inanimate objects, I find a fascinating character trait and I ran with it,” Curtis said. “And they cut it out because, I think, people just wouldn’t understand it.”
Lilith and Tina are the main drivers of the film, but the rest of the cast did absolutely nothing until the plot gave them something to shoot, smash, or expose. I don't understand how a film that has both Jack Black and Kevin Hart, two of Hollywood's most successful comedians, didn't make me laugh. Aside from being woefully miscast in the role of the stoic soldier Roland, Hart was simply a facade. The film gave him a great hero moment similar to that of Borderlands 2But since he had no personality beyond “There’s pee in my van,” I didn’t care. Meanwhile, it seemed like the only direction Black took was to be as annoying as possible. Fitting for his character, sure, but ultimately a waste of Black’s multiple talents.
Paying between 20 and 25 dollars to see Borderlands At home it's hard to sell it, but in the end it's worth it. For all the bad decisions that are made in BorderlandsPutting Lilith at the center was by far the smartest thing to do. Characters like her—older, grumpy, jaded, childless women—don't get to star in action movies. And in real life, women like that are practically invisible. But BorderlandsIn terms of style and narrative, Lilith stood out from the screen. You couldn't miss her even if you tried. Borderlands He earned his bad reception, but for what he does with Lilith, he also earned my respect.
