It Was Always A Bad Idea To Make A Movie Based On Borderlands

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Borderlands reviews are out now and for anyone who was looking forward to seeing Claptrap join the ranks of beloved yellow icons like the Minions, Pikachu, and SpongeBob, it appears you will need to keep waiting. The movie 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:debute𝕴d to zero percent on Rot🌺ten Tomatoes even after 23 reviews, though the number has since risen to a meager three percent. It may rise or fall further as more reviews come in, but the consensus is clear: this thing is rotten.

The Long And Winding Road To The Borderlands Movie

After the past few years, is that really a surprise, though? . The film languished in a protracted three-year post-pro𒁏duction and 🌠its writer Craig Mazin even pulled his nam🔜e from the credits.

Ariana Greenblatt as Tiny Tina in the movie on the left, taking the pin out of a grenade with her teeth. Game Tiny Tina tossing dice in the air on the right.

ꦑ Making T꧙he Borderlands Characters Less Abrasive Also Made Them Boring

Where's the screaming🔯? The c⛎reative death threats? The blood?

Posts 168澳洲幸运5开奖🐼网: 🎐

In the time since principal photography on Borderlands wrapped, Cate Blanchett starred in the Oscar-nominated drama Tàr, which came out all the way back in the fall of 2022. Jamie Lee Curtis did the entirety of the Everything Everywhere All At Once awards circuit that won her an Oscar. Mazin penned the critically acclaimed 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us HBO series which ironically raised the bar for video game adaptations at the start of last year. And director Eli Roth made Thanksgiving, the minor horror hit thཧat played in theaters last fall. A lot has happened, and the movie has just been there, waiting, unreleased.

It isn’t uncommon for a filmmaker to go make a smaller scale movie while FX work is finalized on a bigger film. Steven Spielberg famously did it with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List. What is unusual is the sheer length of time Boꦆrderlands’ post-production laste🃏d.

The Problems Of Adapting Borderlands

Setting aside the specifics of this Borderlands movie, it seems unlikely that any Borderlands movie could have worked. The series has always been defined by three primary characteristics: its 1) cel-shaded art style, 2) obnoxious and juvenile sense of humor and, 3) billions of over-the-top guꦬns.

From early on, it was clear that while the movie was borrowing the games' character designs and iconography, it wasn't going to attempt to translate the vibrance of its comic book art style to live-action.

The cast of the Borderlands movie in costume

On the other hand, it could work in the plentiful firearms. But audiences don't turn out to see movies on the basis of the number of guns. They tend to be interested in what the filmmakers do with them. You could sell 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:John Wick Chapter 4 on the sheer amount of guns, but why? As a fan of action movies, I'm interested in if there are any cool new guns on display (like the fire-belching shotgun from the overhead sequence) and what John and the many goons he dispatches are going to do with those cool guns. There could be five hundred thousand, but that isn't necessarily going to move the needle any more than five would.

Billions of guns is a selling point in the games because their gameplay loops are built around collecting better and better weapons as you progress. A gun that does one percent more acid damage may be a game-changer for your build, but that kind of fine-grained detail isn't remotely interesting in a movie.

So, that leaves you with the sense of humor, and that's always been the weakest aspect of Borderlands, despite being one of its most salient. There are cool aspects to the world — like the fact that there is no real government, just multiple gun manufacturers vying for galactic dominance — but it's hard to care too much about those speculative fiction aspects when the game is mostly interested in loud side characters and Butt Stallions.

This is a series that you need to play to like, and if you remove the interactive aspects, you’re left with a pretty obnoxious Mad Max riff. I haven't seen the movie yet — though, as an AMC A-List subscriber, I probably will — but the near-universally negative reviews suggest that Roth and co. couldn’t figure out a way to make a good movie based on a series players like me enjoy in spite of itself.