Where can one even begin with Borderlands? God, I wish I knew.
The video game adaptation Borderlands is credited to Eli Roth, the horror-action director known for films like Hostel, the controversial Death Wish remake, and the recent Thanksgiving. Despite his notable track record, it’s well-known that Roth was removed from the project during reshoots.
So if Borderlands feels to you like a film with no discernible intent, tone, aesthetic, or vibe in general, that’s probably because it is. This film was shot all the way back in 2021, and has been trapped in an unending cycle of test screenings (all of which allegedly yielded vehemently negative results… which tracks) and reshoots (some of which were overseen by original Deadpool director and frequent David Fincher collaborator Tim Miller who called the experience “…interesting”). For context’s sake, that means that Borderlands was shot before actress Ariana Greenblatt went on to film Barbie and before Cate Blanchett went on to film Tár, both of which are films that managed to come out over a year prior to Borderlands.
I say all of this to say, there have been stories swirling for the better part of half a decade now about how awful everything surrounding this film has been. And you know what? Even with all of that background information kicking around in my head, I was still blown away by how utterly incoherent and downright heinous Borderlands is.
For clarity’s sake, I’ll take the time here to admit that I’ve never played any of the games, and as such, didn’t have any of those preconceived notions or expectations going into this movie. Obviously, that shouldn’t impact things; it’s an adaptation that should stand on its own two feet. But it’s worth noting that none of the faults I found with Borderlands stemmed from the ways in which it differs from its source material. My problems stem solely from the fact that it’s an awful movie.
So what makes Borderlands so bad? Well, to be frank, kind of everything. I can’t even really do the house-special of a “Top 5” structure here, because it would be nigh impossible to narrow the atrociousness of this film down to five single points of entry. So let’s just say: everything is wrong with Borderlands. The writing, the direction, the cinematography, the performances, the designs, the needle drops, the musical score, the editing, the color grading. Everything is wrong with Borderlands.
Is this a case of some sort of lost masterpiece? Well, maybe, but probably not in the way you think. You see, the original screenplay for Borderlands as a film came from Craig Mazin, of Emmy-winning Chernobyl and The Last of Us fame. According to multiple sources, Mazin’s script was pretty astounding, to the point that it incited a bidding war across multiple studios. However, upon Eli Roth’s boarding of the project, Roth saw fit to do his own pass on Mazin’s script. Roth’s resulting work is largely readily apparent in the finished film, and was apparently such a drastic overhaul in terms of tone, story, and quality that Mazin had his name removed from Borderlands entirely.
Okay, but what about Roth’s original cut pre-reshoots? Surely that was better than whatever this is, right? I wouldn’t say so. This is less objective and more subjective than any of the other details thus far, but to me personally, the theatrical version of Borderlands wreaks to high heaven of latter-day Eli Roth. I found Roth’s attempts at characterizing modern day teens to be absolutely maddening in Thanksgiving, as the filmmakers seemed entirely unable to empathize with characters of that age group. And Borderlands is packed to the gills with stuff that feels exactly like the kind of would-be-edge-lord stuff Roth thinks modern teenagers will enjoy.
Simultaneously, the action in Borderlands is absolutely dreary at best and outright illegible at worst. This is also very much in line with Roth’s most recent fare, as his Death Wish remake featured the exact same kind of incredibly poorly staged, choppily edited, and often incoherent muddiness in its setpieces. Perhaps most notable of all is the simple fact that Roth’s original motivation for making Borderlands in the first place was to make something “totally bonkers and bat-shit crazy,” and in gunning for that, Roth’s original decisions for the film’s overriding tone, aesthetic, look, and overall feel is painfully garish and grating.
Maybe the most depressing thing about all of this is the way that Roth’s “totally bonkers” M.O. even distorts the performances of some truly great actors. Cate fucking Blanchett is in this movie, and gives one of the worst performances of her entire career. I love Blanchett, and there’s absolutely a surreal-level of insanity seeing her strut around like a literal video game avatar, so I at least appreciate her physical prowess and commitment to the bit, but Borderlands treats her like garbage. The same can be said of every single great actor who makes up the film’s cast. Every single one of them feels like they were pushed into the most overblown and flat-out obnoxious characterizations imaginable, with Roth’s initial direction assumedly being to just go “bigger” and “louder” for every single delivery.
But even with all of that, the film itself is so dreadfully dull. It seems obvious to anyone watching the film that Roth was just so thoroughly out of his depth here. The opening scenes of the movie are staged with all the skill and excitement of watching paint dry. In an attempt to mask some of the most awkward in-camera pacing and staging of the film, additional dialogue has been hastily stapled on over the top of sequences to try and fill the huge gaps of empty space in the screen-time, but the result just calls more attention to the problem.
It’s also readily apparent that those involved with Borderlands post-Roth’s departure recognized a great many of these issues and tried to fix them. But the resulting solutions are band aids haphazardly slapped over full-blown bullet wounds. The amount of dialogue in this film that is ADR-ed over is mind-boggling to an insane degree, with entire conversations being constructed via off-screen ADR. All of this makes for a movie that doesn’t even feel like a movie. Everything about Borderlands feels like a painful approximation of what someone who had never seen a movie before thinks a movie might be. Over the course of its nearly two hour runtime, not a single joke lands, not a single emotional beat ever has a chance of resonating, and not a single thing that happens inspires anything other than the hardiest of sighs and the deepest of eye-rolls.
RGM GRADE
(F)
Ultimately, Borderlands is a worst-case scenario, a film that is both obscenely dull and often gratuitously abrasive. It feels like some penance that each of these exceedingly talented actors had to pay to move onto much better projects. But I will say, there is exactly one positive thing to come out of me having seen Borderlands, and it is this: At the end of Todd Field’s exquisite Cate Blanchett-starring Tár, after a great deal of ethical controversy, Blanchett’s titular conductor is reduced to having to work as for-hire conductor of an orchestra at some sort of buffoonish video game tie-in musical concert, at which the entire audience is dressed in some of the most garish outfits imaginable. It’s a tragic ending for the character but a very funny stinger to end the film on and it always has been. But the fact that Blanchett went straight from the set of Borderlands to film Tár gives that ending that extra little bite of metatextual spite, aimed directly at this film, and it makes me love Tár that much more.
