Review by C.J. Bunce
Super Mario Brothers, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Doom, Warcraft, Assassin’s Creed, Sonic the Hedgehog, Halo, Uncharted, The Witcher, The Last of Us, Fallout, Five Nights at Freddy’s, Minecraft. They’re not just video games, but movies and TV series, with more on the way: Atari just signed a deal with Entertainment 360 and Universal Pictures to bring ten classic video games to the movies: Asteroids, Adventure, Berzerk, Breakout, Centipede, Crystal Castles, Millipede, Missile Command, Pong, and Yars’ Revenge. Universal is also reportedly working with Nintendo on a forthcoming Donkey Kong live-action movie. New Line Cinema is working on a Space Invaders movie. And we pretty much got to see Pac-Man come to life in the movie Pixels. Alas, no Frogger or Pitfall–yet. The heart of all of these goes back to Tron and The Last Starfighter–movies about video games where the games weren’t in the arcades first. Flash ahead 40 years to others in the same vein, Free Guy and the Jumanji movies, to see the tropes are still alive and well. We love a good video game tie-in–you’ll find discussions of years of video game tie-ins here at borg. We previewed the trailer for the latest, Borderlands, back in 2024 and at last it has made its way to the small screen, now streaming on Peacock.
Directed by Eli Roth, Borderlands is a fun, action-filled new entry in the video game genre, pulling in all sorts of first person shooter and space Western tropes, and featuring an all-star cast led by Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis, Gina Gershon, Ariana Greenblatt, Bobby Lee, Janina Gavankar, and the voice of Jack Black as the video game’s familiar robot Claptrap. It also is a solid new sci-fi fantasy setting, mixing the vibe of Guardians of the Galaxy, Cowboy Bebop, and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. with some Mad Max and Tank Girl thrown in.
In case you haven’t heard of it, Borderlands is a series of action-heavy, first-person shooter video games created by Gearbox Software, released between 2009 and 2022. Borderlands is one of the biggest selling video game series of all time—but like Resident Evil and Assassin’s Creed and so many other games, it has multiple layers, stories, and characters, so the stars of this film aren’t those you’ll find in the game. But the centerpiece is the Vault, and there are many of them. Vaults are full of riches and sometimes great powers–think of a character in a video game snatching a purse that suddenly explodes with prizes. So instead of bounty hunters, Vault Hunters are after these sporadic caches of riches stashed across the galaxy–and nobody seems to know who put them there. Cate Blanchett as a bright red-haired bandit named Lilith who is adamant she’s a bounty hunter and doesn’t care about the vaults. She’s from Pandora, which has a vault not yet discovered, and she doesn’t want to go back. But she’s quick to change her mind for a big bounty. That bounty is Tiny Tina, played by Ariana Greenblatt, daughter of the guy paying the bounty. That’s Atlas, played by Edgar Ramírez, the one character that is quite flat. One-note villains seem to be showing up in movies a lot lately.
Kevin Hart actually trained with SEALs for the role of Roland, a former member of the Crimson Lance and now a mercenary. He’s the first in to rescue Tina, who has befriended and been protected by Krieg, played by Florian Munteanu, one of the game’s “Psychos” who resembles every other character in the Mad Max franchise. Once Lilith arrives on Pandora, she’s surprised to find a Claptrap robot waiting for her. She learns that Atlas has also hired Crimson Lance to retrieve Tina–a development that lands Lillith and Roland on the same side. Led by Janina Gavankar as Knoxx (daughter of a character from the game), with Bobby Lee as Larry, Crimson Lance takes after the new team of Lilith, Tina, & Company and it’s a big wild ride to the end. That might include actually discovering the keys to Pandora’s vault.
If you’re trying to identify where the setting of Pandora falls compared to other sci-fi, think of the mall in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets with the poverty level of District 9 and the fantasy elements of The Fifth Element. Add those denizens from Mad Max and the red Kodan from The Last Starfighter and you’ll be about there. It’s hard not to compare the team to the Guardians of the Galaxy. It features a similar gang of mercenaries, outlaws, and misfits–every type except swap a robot for the machine gun-firing raccoon. I mentioned back in 2024 in my review of Anthony Burch’s game tie-in novel Borderlands: Debt or Alive how brilliantly the story was written and how snappy he penned the dialogue for his space-faring heroes. Burch was a writer for one of the games, but I wish he’d penned the screenplay for the movie. The framework of the storytelling is the big piece that missed the mark, revealing everything via Lilith voiceovers instead of just letting the viewer meet every new surprise and twist head-on.
But sometimes it’s fun enough to just be able to walk around in a good looking sci-fi setting, and that’s exactly what is the best feature here–tied with the cast of characters. It matches the tone of Cowboy Bebop–the live-action and animated versions–Blanchett’s Lilith could easily be swapped for Faye Valentine. Greenblatt’s Tina is a tiny Tank Girl, or Hit Girl with different powers. She’s a rabbit-eared anime girl come to life. The movie is also the rare treat with more interesting female characters than male. Could they have done more with Gershon’s bar gal and Curtis’s quirky tech guru? Definitely.
It’s far from perfect, but if you enjoy a good space romp and don’t mind that your video game movie isn’t 100% adapted from the game, get ready to have some fun. Borderlands looks good and the characters are having a great time. Catch Borderlands now streaming on Peacock.
