Eli Roth’s adaptation of the popular video game series Borderlands is unlikely to impress gamers or mainstream moviegoers, with a chaotic tone and a shambolic plot, writes Luke Buckmaster.
Borderlands
Cate Blanchett has bright candy-red hair and sass to spare as Lilith, the protagonist of Borderlands: a bounty hunter entangled in a treasure-hunting narrative that’s more like a wildly out of control vehicle than a storyline per se. Adapted from the first-person-shooter franchise of the same name, Eli Roth’s pulp-splattered action spectacle feels, despite its ancestry, more comic book than video game, with a highly sculpted junkyard look contrasting earthy tones and electric colours, splashing the hair dye from The Suicide Squad onto Mad Maxian deserts and Blade Runner-esque cities.
The film’s set on the distant planet of Pandora, which is rather different to the place of the same name from the Avatar movies: here the existence of lush green rain forests is unthinkable; ditto for benevolent blue aliens tuned to the life force around them. Roth emphasises that this as a dog-eat-dog, eye-for-an-eye world lodged in the bowels of the cosmos, attracting all kinds of scumbags and grifters, some of whom are “Vault Hunters” in search of a long-rumoured repository of priceless architects and secrets stashed away by an advanced alien race.
Lilith is a lone wolf anti-hero recruited to find and retrieve Ariana Greenblatt’s “Tiny Tina” the missing daughter of the CEO (Edgar Ramírez) of a hugely powerful mega corporation. But her mission evolves into searching for the vault, Tiny Tina considered as crucial to the operation as the girl in Waterworld with a tattoo of a map on her back. Lilith reluctantly joins up with a posse including Kevin Hart’s ex-mercenary Roland, Jamie Lee Curtis’ scientist Dr. Patricia Tannis, and Florian Munteanu’s Krieg, a buff meathead in gimp garb who grunts and smashes things.
Roth doesn’t trust the audience to get immersed in what little there is of a narrative, so barely any scenes go by without wisecracks, detonations of bling and/or hordes of easily defeated baddies who (faithful to the source material) behave like braindead NPCs. There’s also a chatterbox droid that, in the great tradition of C-3PO and co., was clearly programmed to fill silences and deliver lame one-liners. If you can call them that: in one scene, which is typical of the bot’s insipid antics, it enters the foreground as a flying vessel crashes to the ground merely to yell “everybody run!”
Touches like that are extremely lame, and fuel a growing feeling that the film itself is a clunky old ship trying to present itself as new, with a generational distance between those steering it and the target audience. There’s plenty of other flashes of spectacle, with what I swore in one aerial shot was a dragon swooping around in the sky, for no particular purpose and never to be seen again. The tone oscillates between barely controlled and full-on bedlam, though not of the remotely innovative kind, the narrative thrust pushing towards a flavourless finale involving shiny objects and blasts of phosphorescent light.
The MCU has conditioned us to expect less and less from these sorts of movies. In this climate the kind of old school matinee charm projected in 2012’s John Carter now feels almost experimentally bold. I enjoyed a couple of the small touches in Borderlands, including hologram-like masks that project avatars over people’s faces, and Polaroid-like photos that display short videos. They remind us that while this terrain is very well flogged there’s endless opportunities for visual and environmental inventions, especially when combining space settings with digital technologies—like in the very fun augmented reality bazaar scene in 2017’s under-rated Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.
Borderlands has little colour and life beyond things that flare up on the surface and are instantly forgotten. Blanchett knows this isn’t the sort of production she can make or break, so she does what she can, keeping a straight face while the movie explodes around her.
