Round Up: The First Impressions Of The Borderlands Movie Are In

Aw dang, I actually thought the trailers looked quite fun! Still probably gonna watch this though because I tend to be more forgiving than the average critic lol.

So the Borderlands movie is a steaming turd?. Id like to say colour me surprised but i dont think i really need to, do i?
We all knew how it would turn out.

Yet another adult game franchise getting the neutered PG-13 movie treatment?

I didn’t have any stakes for this movie either way, but these days it’s harder to believe what critics think anyway.

While they seem to collectively think this is bad, they’ve also collectively praised a lot of garbage in recent times and shunned some good stuff too.

Yeeeah. Kevin Hart hasnt been funny in at least 10 years. I'll pass.

Ugh...I can hardly take ANY film critic's words nowadays...

But how did I not know this was already out...? Probably cuz I wasn't paying any attention...Eh, oh well. Minor problem.

Yeah, this isn't surprising at all. Usually videogame movies are awful and this one looked really, really bad since the trailers. The casting alone is terrible.

"I had no hopes or expectations and still came away disappointed."

• God

Also the movie looked dull in the trailers!

There are some games that have potential as movies, but there are a LOT where doing a movie feels like a huge downgrade. The whole interactive character of video games is what make them uniquely more powerful at telling a compelling story.

Borderlands never had a particularly good or compelling story and the storytelling only works, because the player is at the wheel for the biggest part. I'm not surprised this movie is probably not going to be doing well at the box office.

The main reason games generally fail at being turned into films is because game developers can't write.

They can create fantastic games. Stunning locales. Emotionally charged music. Vibrant sound effects. Photo realistic graphics.

But they can't write a story. And it comes down to ownership. A studio comes up with an idea and thinks that gives them the right to tell the story and develop the characters.

Borderlands is a series I rate highly and enjoy. Does it have a good story to tell? No it absolutely does not.

I firmly believe the reason the games industry is largely mocked and laughed at by the wider arts and entertainment community is because of the writing standard being so low.

Even the games we, the videogame community, rate highly... Final Fantasy 7 has some moments of great storytelling.... but oh wait... it's descending into sheer and utter nonsense.

So yes. The film will be bad and its because the story is bad.

@Kidfunkadelic83 I'd be suprisded if it wasn't bad.

I saw the movie last night. It's really bad. Spent most of the movie rolling my eyes

@BIG3 hart was never funny. At all.

Im Sure MOST of the people that said this movie was terrible would also call something like Deadpool and wolverine or the Titanic horrble as well. Goodness 9.5 times out of 10 you can never trust a rotten tomatoes or imdb or really basically most of these tweeting lamos reviews.

@nocdaes

I'm not really sure what you are even traying to say here.

Developers are not the one that write the stories for modern games. They hire experienced writers. Borderlands 2, TPS and Tales from the Borderlands were all written by award winning writer Anthony Burch, who has written for Adventure Time, Rocket Jump and Anime Crimes Division, as well as 2 extremely successful scripted Pod Casts. The later games were written by Connor Thomas Cleary, who was trained in theater, sound design and screenwriting.

Even back in the FF7 days they hired people who's education and background was in writing, not game development. Kazushige Nojima, who wrote FF7, was educated as a screenwriter.

Game developers or even game writers also had nothing to do with this movie. The movie was written by Eli Roth, who is known for ... well, mostly bad horror movies.

If anything, the problem is that Anthony Burch wasn't asked to write this movie.

George R. R. Martin worked on Elden Ring, Orson Scott Card's worked on Monkey Island, or Philip K. Dick award nominated novelist Marc Laidlaw worked as lead writer on Half-Life, just to name a few heavy hitters in the writing world who have worked on games.

And let's not forget that Erik Wolpawm, one of an elite group of writers to win awards from both the Writers Guild of America and the BAFTA won both those awards for writing Portal 2.

Game writers are just writers, hired to write a video game.

It's a live action of a computer game movie, why are people still surprised when they are bad?

Yo, they have claptrap from Poker Night at the Inventory in this movie?!

I'm totally unsurprised by this, I saw the trailer when I went to see deadpool & wolverine, by the middle of it I wanted to die in order to stop having to watch it. It's just gonna be a big backwards step in video game adaptations, after the recent successes of Mario, sonic, fallout and the last of us it's so dissapointing to see Hollywood still getting it so wrong... Counter it with the instigators trailer which had me laughing all the way through...

This absolutely looks like a movie that will be airing on TBS constantly.

I recall a certain Nintendo developer saying they start with a fundamental gameplay idea and build from there. If a certain IP fits the idea, they’ll use that. If it demands and an entirely new IP (like Splatoon, which went from tofu blocks to rabbits to squid kids) then they’ll develop the IP around the core concept.

It seems a lot of modern media takes the opposite approach: start with an IP, try to haphazardly bodge it into something resembling entertainment, then hope it sells on brand power alone.

Sometimes it works. (The Lego Movie, Barbie). More often than not it doesn’t. (Monster Hunter, Resident Evil, Assassin’s Creed, Tomb Raider, Warcraft, Ratchet and Clank, Sonic, etc.)

We’ll see how the Twister and Battleships movies pan out. I don’t have particularly high hopes.

@nocdaes I agree to a degree with you on the storytelling part, but a lot of the best stories I know are from videogames, and not books or movies.

But I have to agree that the amount of mediocre or bad stories in games is larger than the amount of bad stories in movies, although it's a very thin line, as there are plenty of B-movies around. And there's a ton of really, really bad books... Especially in the selfpublished sector.

Sooo, can a Borderlands fan tell me if this is how the games are too? Because this is kind of how they look. Are they supposed to look so strange and generally unappealing? Is it supposed to grow on you?

I honestly would love to get into Borderlands, and this felt like a good place to ask.

@Mrkittyhead The games are fun, especially if you play them coop with friends. I've played 1, 2, 3 and the pre-sequel. I think 2 and 3 are better than the first entry. It's basically Diablo in first person shooter form. If you like that concept, I'm sure you'll love the games.

The story is larger than life and way over the top. The humour is dark and gritty, which just happens to be my thing.

Long story short, Borderlands is definitely not for everyone, but the gameplay loop is a lot of fun and it can be truly challenging, once you've finished your first run and want to go at it again a second time in new game+

Yeah. Unfortunately I think must of us saw that one coming.

@DanijoEX-the-Pierrot It comes out tomorrow.

Crap, as expected.

Welp, sounds like Assassin's Creed impressions all over again. Which means I can almost confidently expect a good time when I get to watch the movie myself. So thank you for your collectively endured first world ordeal, fanbloid dodos.😁 And, I suppose, thank NL for compiling them here so that audience in the vicinity like myself doesn't have to go out of their way to be updated on valuable info like a guy's report on his own face?

Live action movies based on video games always sucks. Nothing unusual. Only Uwe Boll's(!) Postal can be considered a good adaptation, lol.

Does look rather poo.

Can’t be as bad as Acolyte. Yeah it’s a Disney+ show but still it falls into the entertainment category so I feel it’s fair to compare.

Looks greasier than Randy Pitchford and that’s saying a lot , these games are nothing but weightless feeling bullet sponge simulators for people who think a nonstop barrage of irritating zany characters saying stuff “butt stallion” is the cleverest writing in the world.

Boy, I sure am glad that's Take-Two's bag to hold now and not ours.

Man, it sure does feel good when bad things happen to bad people

@gamingxaidan Yeah, I thought the trailer looked pretty good. I still want to give it a chance, but I might wait until it's on streaming somwhere.

The Borderlands movie just dropped on YouTube. The real one. The KBash 2 hour 45 minute epic about the series lol.

It’s good

They didn't even try to do the actors' makeup heavy and shaded to try to make them look cel-shaded.

Even cosplayers do that; come on, Hollywood.

Based on that trailer, the producers clearly had absolutely zero idea of who or what the character Tiny Tina is.

I tried twice to get into the Borderland Series. Both times I was disappointed and moved on with buyers remorse.

I won't be going to a theatre to see this one, but I'm not opposed to watching it once it makes its way to streaming. I find that sometimes people are little too harsh on this type of movie.

Kevin Hart is in the movie?! Pass!

If you’ve seen him in a movie once, you seen him in all his movies. Extra loud, acts scared of everything, too over the top, that surprised dumb look he makes all the time.

This is the first I even heard that there would be a Borderlands movie, and my first thought was, "Okay, but why?" as it is with so many other video-game adaptations. I will say in its defense that I appreciate that they cast actresses over 50 in their stylized action sci-fi movie. I just wish it had been for an original idea or even a ripoff of Borderlands: I'd be all about seeing Jamie Lee Curtis and Cate Blanchett in something like that. But I'm not confident that this had any ideas behind it beyond "Let's make a movie with the Borderlands IP" (I have not watched the trailer as of this writing).

The games were cringe on release. This was never going to be good

@AllieKitsune that's an incredibly specific expectation

Tried to get into the franchise long ago. But it just didn't click. So I have no skin in this game. But if I were a fan, I would probably check it out anyway and come to my own conclusions first.

@PurpulTyeDye
Granting RT is just an aggregate of movie reviewers, Deadpool and wolverine has a rotten tomatoes of like 75, Titanic almost 90, and this movie has a rotten tomatoes of 7.

Seven.

I would like to suggest that the expectations of things that you are "sure" of could use refinement. In other words, you are so wrong.

A (not so) spoiler alert: It sucks

I’m totally shocked. Never saw this coming. Who would’ve guessed a game series with no story would make a bad movie? We look forward to the next video game movie bomb: The Zelda movie.

Already had tickets booked before the reviews dropped, so I was kinda tied into it, but... damn.

Four people in an already-worryingly-tiny-for-its-third-day screen. Just four. Not a laugh, not a giggle, not a snigger, nary even a snort. From ANY of us. Just singularly Not Funny - kind of a problem when it's being pitched as an action-comedy.

In comparison, Deadpool & Wolverine last weekend was full of whoops, hollers, cheers and howling laughter. But when you've got Jack Black in probably the least funny outing of his entire career, and you find yourself wishing Kevin Hart had stuck to basketball, that's really Not A Good Sign.

Borderlands pitched itself completely wrong as a movie. It was never going to live up to the games' main premise of Billions Of Guns™. On top of that, the characters were half-baked; Blanchett & Curtis were just picking up the cheque. Lilith is just a Rule-63ed Han Solo with better threads and, granted, a very nice line in contrapposto. But whilst a well-cocked hip props her up, it saves n o t h i n g about this film at all.

This thing is worse than the 1993 Mario movie (which at least had Almost Unreal), Street Fighter (Ming-na Wen), Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (Kristin Kreuk), anything that Uwe Boll farted out (.....yeah, I got nothing)... yes, it's even worse than Pixels. COMBINED. Eli Roth should be made to deedpoll his name to Alan Smithee.

I'm going to go see Deadpool & Wolverine again at some point this month. I have to. Because, with every cell of my being, I resent this pile of toss being the screening that meant my Unlimited sub paid for itself.