On why the Borderlands movie is trash
Yesterday I went and watched the Borderlands movie. I tooted about it, writing that it was a bad movie. That toot got a couple of likes, but only one brave soul asked what was wrong with the movie.
I have written up an answer. I feel like I should apologize.
It turns out that there is quite a lot of things wrong with this movie. In my opinion it all comes down to writing. Meaning the script is not good and the characters are wholly undercooked. The movie is laserfocused on being as funny as possible. In its runtime of a mere 102 minutes, the movie probably fires off about 200 of what it thinks are jokes. Not a single one landed completely for me and the four other people with me at the cinema barely gave it a chuckle or two, if that.
That's mostly due to the fact that the jokes are just bad banter, the timing is completely off and none of the actors seem to be fully invested in this. Add to this that many characters like Tiny Tina and Claptrap are as annoying as their videogame counterparts and you have one unfunny movie.
But wait, there's more: The script is badly written too! The characters are flat and have no arcs, besides Lilith and Tiny Tina who progress a little bit. Since the characters have no depth or motivations to speak of, there is little interaction. Without interaction, you have no chemistry and without that the entirety of the movie, which is mostly a series of moments where the cast runs away from things because why would they need agency if they can just react to everything that is happening to them, falls flat on its face.
I am not going into spoilerterritory here, so I'm just going to take one very early example. We have an opening scene where Roland, played by Kevin Hart, saves Tiny Tina on a space station. The door to her cell is opened, Star Wars gets a bad parodic nod, some banter ensues, they fight a character you don't realize is actually the antagonist and pick up another party member that has four lines of dialogue in the entire movie. However, the movie is nice enough to tell us that Tiny Tina is the daughter of Atlas and it makes sure to tell us that yes, Roland is the good guy here and Atlas isn't exactly the good guy here. Then the movie switches over to Lilith as the protagonist. She is hired by Atlas to find his daughter. But we already know that Roland is the good guy here. Hence a lot of possible dramatic tension is lost. The trade-off the writers went for here probably was the benefit of introducing a couple of characters. However, we get so little time with them, so little interaction – even here the movie interrupts itself with an action scene, as it so often does – that nothing is gained in the process.
In my opinion, the movie would have worked at least a bit better without this opening scene. Without us knowing who kidnapped/freed Tiny Tina. Without us knowing who the good guys are already. Yes, there is the marketing material, which already tells us that this is going to be a “ragtag team of misfits”-kind of movie, but it would still make for better drama and dare I say it better character interactions.
The thing is that I am almost sure that this is how the movie was originally supposed to go but someone had the brilliant idea that we really needed that scene to not be confused. Probably the same person who thought it was a good idea to integrate two powerpoint level exposition dumps in the first 20 minutes.
But why doesn't the movie have enough time to really set up these characters, I hear you ask. That comes mostly down to the pacing. The movie confuses good pacing with “action all the time”. We can't have characters talking to each other in a meaningful way for two minutes if they immediately get shot at. What little there is doesn't do enough to give these characters any real motivation. And the script leaves the actors hanging in so many moments. Cate Blanchett tries so hard to snark it up, but there's nothing to work with here.
There are positive aspects to this movie. The colourgrading is well done and the movie is pleasant enough to look at, with some neat camerawork. This is undercut by the editing, which makes the otherwise decent action scenes harder to watch than they needed to be.
Another plus – and this is the biggest, I'd argue – is that after 102 minutes, you're done with the movie and you can forget about it.