[COLUMN] Borderlands is a Classically Bad Movie | by Darren Mooney

In August 2015, Lionsgate announced that it was developing a feature film based around the video game franchise Borderlands.

This made a great deal of sense. Lionsgate had just emerged from a sustained period of growth, evolving from an independent studio to what is known in the industry as a “mini-major” off the back of the Saw and later Hunger Games franchises. The Borderlands announcement came just three months before the release of Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2, suggesting that Lionsgate saw Borderlands as a potentially lucrative long-term investment.

This was logical. Borderlands is a pretty big deal. The video game franchise has grossed over a billion dollars to date, selling more than 77 million units since it launched in 2009. Video games movies had traditionally been a risky proposition in Hollywood, with embarrassments like Super Mario Bros. or Street Fighter, but Lionsgate was making a bet that the tides were shifting and that the next intellectual property boom might lie in video games.

In that sense Lionsgate were on to something. In 2019, Pokémon Detective Pikachu demonstrated that video game movies could be good. In 2020, Sonic the Hedgehog proved that they could be profitable. However, Borderlands languished in development and later postproduction hell. It was finally released in August 2024, nine years after it was announced and a year after The Last of Us and The Super Mario Bros. Movie raised the bar for such adaptations qualitatively and commercially.

Borderlands was a spectacular flop. It was reviled by critics and opened to just $8.8m on a production budget of $115m and a publicity budget of $30m. It’s not great when Uwe Boll is dunking on a movie on social media. To be fair, Boll’s three highest grossing movies (House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark and In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale) all grossed under $14m, and Borderlands will probably limp past that milestone. However, Boll’s movies also cost a lot less.

So, how exactly did this happen? How did Borderlands end up this bad? Why is the movie such a disaster? The answers aren’t particular novel or special. Borderlands isn’t some bizarre unicorn in the grand history of Hollywood. This isn’t a story of excess and ego suggesting classic cautionary tales like Heaven’s Gate or Waterworld. It isn’t even a study of incompetence or inexperience like Amazon’s absurd spending on shows like Citadel, a series so lavish that they shot it twice.

In this era of industry uncertainty and streaming chaos, of mega-franchise nostalgia and digital necromancy, there’s something endearingly simple in the awfulness of Borderlands. It is bad, but it isn’t bad in some strange new way that threatens to completely hollow the film industry out from the inside. It is bad in ways that movies have always been bad, and for many of the same reasons. It’s a bad movie, that everybody realized was bad, and which they made worse in postproduction.

The Borderlands film began gaining traction in February 2020, just a week after the release of Sonic the Hedgehog and just a few weeks before COVID lockdowns would shut down the industry and send many projects into hibernation. Lionsgate announced Eli Roth as director, which might seem like something of a strange fit. After all, Roth remains best known for his low-budget horror work on films like Cabin Fever and the Hostel franchise.

However, Roth was a reasonable choice in context. In 2018, he directed an adaptation of the beloved children’s book The House with the Clock in Its Walls, which starred Cate Blanchett and Jack Black and went on to gross $131m on a $42m budget. Roth worked quickly to secure Blanchett and Black for Borderlands, with Blanchett accepting in what she described as a moment of “COVID madness” which allowed Roth to use the respected Oscar-winner as “actor bait.”

Roth gets a lot of criticism, and some of it is deserved. However, he is an avowed cinephile with a deep and abiding affection for horror. Setting aside debates about the quality of his work, Roth’s films exist in conversation with the genre’s history. There’s no doubting Roth’s passion. That passion extended to The House with the Clock in Its Walls. Although Roth had never read the book, it was in his wheelhouse, to the point that he owned the cover art for another of writer John Bellairs’ books.

In contrast, Roth doesn’t seem to have had any particular affinity for video games as an artform. He’s talked about being so inexperienced that he had to be guided through the Borderlands video game by Christy Pitchford, instead gravitating towards “the same influences” that inspired the game: Mad Max, Escape from New York, Star Wars. As a result, there is already a sense of abstraction, with Roth more interested in the films that inspired the game than in the game itself.

By most accounts, there was a push-and-pull concerning how faithful the film should be to the game. Roth stated that he didn’t want it to be “too slavish” to the source material. Developer Randy Pitchford opined that the first draft of the script “only resembled the Borderlands universe by vibe.” The finished version isn’t rigorously faithful to the game, but it does contain a lot of fanservice, including dubbing the character of Kreig (Florian Munteanu) with dialogue from the game.

This is one of the original sins of Borderlands, something that would have doomed the movie even before the postproduction quagmire: the film has no identity of its own. It’s very obvious that the production team working on the movie don’t have anything interesting or distinctive to say about these characters or their world. So, like any panicking student facing down a deadline, the Borderlands team mercilessly cribbed from a much better and more popular film: Guardians of the Galaxy.

Now look, this isn’t an essay about James Gunn. However, it is worth acknowledging that Gunn is one of the most consistently reliable blockbuster directors working today. It is disconcerting how much of that is down to the simple fact that he makes sure that he has a finished script before he begins shooting. This is one reason why he rarely does reshoots, which makes him cost-effective and his work more internally consistent. That is what you should copy from James Gunn.

Instead, Borderlands just lifts whole concepts. This is a story about a devilish space rogue wrestling with their mummy issues, teaming up with a dysfunctional band that includes a big muscly guy played by a professional athlete, some computer-generated comic relief and the daughter of one of the baddest guys in the cosmos. It’s even possible to pick out specific references, with Moxxi’s evoking Knowhere and Jamie Lee Curtis’ Tannis styled like Benecio del Toro’s the Collector.

To be clear, this is a fairly common move when studios license an adaptation of a work that they don’t understand. Another of this year’s August releases, Harold and the Purple Crayon struggled to adapt Crockett Johnson’s beloved children’s book, so just smashed together recognizable elements of more popular films in the same market space. Zachary Levi reprised his role from Shazam!, as a kid in an adult’s body. Zooey Deschannel reprised her role from Elf as the store worker dealing with a naive arrival from an imaginary world. It was somebody else’s homework, crudely copied in crayon.

These lazy rip-offs fail to understand why the originals worked. Borderlands misses the warmth, humor or characterization that made Guardians of the Galaxy so compelling. These characters aren’t funny, they’re just unpleasant. The soundtrack is full of needle-drops, but all of them are painfully obvious, making the movie feel like the playlist at the worst part that you attended circa 2008. This would have been obvious during principle photography, between April and June 2021.

Still, it seems quite clear that Lionsgate realized immediately that they had a turkey. Rather than just admitting defeat, the company rushed into salvage mode, committing to a series of reshoots. This is probably why Borderlands cost so much while looking so cheap. It was essentially made over two long years, and costs are going to accrue. However, because actors like Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart and Jamie Lee Curtis are all busy people, reshoots had to be delayed, staggered and adjusted.

There’s a very uncanny quality to a movie where the studio has tried to run a salvage job in postproduction. There are a number of clues. To help excuse scenes cut out to get the runtime down, there tends to be a lot of expository voice over. To cover up dubbing, there are a lot of shots of the back of actors’ heads as they speak. To conceal the fact that actors weren’t free at the same time, actors rarely share the same shot, even when characters share the same space – like a car.

Borderlands is particularly egregious. Characters often wander through scenes at odd angles, to conceal the use of doubles because the actor wasn’t available. The big group shot at the end of the movie has to be framed from the neck down to focus on Ariana Greenblatt, seemingly because only Jamie Lee Curtis was available that day. There are extended stretches where Kevin Hart just seems to drift out of the movie and Blanchett spends a lot of the movie acting against empty space.

By all accounts, there was chaos. Roth moved on to make Thanksgiving, with two weeks of reshoots overseen by Deadpool director Tim Miller. Craig Mazin had his name removed from the script – which is quite something from a writer who is credited on Chernobyl, The Last of Us and The Hangover Part III. In October 2023, it was announced that Steve Jablonski had replaced Nathan Barr as composer.

The reshoots compounded the film’s fundamental issue: nobody knew what Borderlands was meant to be. To offer a literal illustration of this argument: stunt coordinator Jimmy O’Dee acknowledged the film was shot in with an R-rating in mind and then cut down to a PG-13, rendering its action incoherent. This panicked postproduction was not trying to unearth a hidden gem buried in a confused cut, it was just heaping even more nonsense on top of a movie that was already a mess.

That said, there is some small irony in the idea that a movie titled Borderlands should feel like two shapeless and formless messes heaped on top of each other with no boundary delineating them, making it difficult to figure out where the film’s problems begin or end.