Short version: Don’t bother.

Long version:

Eli Roth is just bad at his job. I said previously that he has never made a good movie and that still holds true.

I don’t really care how much they messed with the lore. I’m fine with that. Why would anyone care anyhow? For most of us, that’s not the reason we play the game. So, if they get that kind of in the right direction, it’s fine.

I get that with a big budget movie like this you really need to appeal to people outside of the core audience of the fans of the game. So, you can’t rely too much on simple fan service and you need to tone down some things to make them more easily approachable to those not in the know. With that being said, you should do your best to use the emotional part of what makes the games appealing. Why else would you bother to pay for a license to make the movie?

What I don’t like is that they didn’t really get the games. Each of the mainline games starts with an introduction by Marcus. I bet most players don’t even quite remember what they are about, but the key information we get is that these are stories. They are not a canon nor should they be taken seriously. Marcus is telling us to have fun. In the movie, this has been replaced by a much more serious approach and it’s by Lilith. Even from the start there’s a disconnect here.

The other thing they clearly missed was the guns. They have been a big part of the marketing of the games from the start. Here, we see mostly pistols. Roland seems to have a Tediore SMG of some kind, but he doesn’t really throw it around. Lilith has an Infinity Pistol, but that’s just there as something for the players to recognize. It’s not really something that matters in any way. Crimson Lance uses pretty standard Atlas assault rifles. I guess Lilith has a sniper rifle in the beginning, but gets rid of it right after for some reason. And that’s it. Tina has some basic grenades.

The movie definitely needed more mayhem, or should I say Mayhem. Dahl weapons with all the weird components to start with. Then Hellwalker, Flakker, Singularity grenades, Plaguebearer, explosive barrels thrown from a vehicle, whatever you can do to show the destructive side of everything. You don’t even need to go as far as to have self-digicopying Tediores, but how about some guns running on their own? I guess you have to keep some kind of grounding here, but that does still leave a lot of options and it all would be helpful in explaining why and how they can take on so many enemies at a time. On top of this, this needed to be R so badly. It needed the gore.

For some reason, the movie also wanted to follow a game structure. We are in a “map”, then there are some obstacles and then we move to another “map”. The maps are also named after maps we know from the games, but I don’t understand why, because none of those places really feel like the places in the games. I know I said I don’t really care about the lore, but this just feels very forced. This kind of a structure is nice for games, but it doesn’t translate well into a movie.

I do like some things. The psychos look cool (but they rely on psychos too much in lieu of other kinds of bandits), Tannis is used pretty well, Tina is less grating than in the games, and while Krieg is not out of control enough, he still works as a character. Oh yeah, and Moxxi works. Of course. Even though the voice was so different that it kind of took me out of the movie for a second, but that is probably not a problem for most.

That being said, Roland is kind of a non-entity. He could have been any generic soldier character and there would not have been much of a difference. Lilith doesn’t really work. It often feels that Blanchett doesn’t quite know what’s going on. I can’t blame her. It’s definitely a director problem.

Finally, I didn’t like how everything revolved around Lilith. Tannis was her guardian for a time and Moxxi apparently remembered her well even though Lilith was just a child when they last met. So, how did Lilith end up with the job? That’s just too big of a coinincidence. I might be just overlook it if everything else worked, but it doesn’t.

Okay, really finally, it might not be obvious under all the Mayhem, but Borderlands games have a heart. What I mean by this is that we learn at some point what makes a psycho a psycho. We learn why Pandora is full of bandits. We learn how Tannis turned into what she is. We learn that there’s a Crimson Lance member who is really into ice cream. All that is lost.

There is nothing of value here. Based on the theater count in the US, which is lower than the absolute flop Harold and the Purple Crayon that opened last week, even the distributor and the theater chains understood this. Maybe if it’s on a streaming service you already have, you can let it play in the background while you clean or something.

EDIT: The Numbers predicts a debut weekend of less than $14 million. While this tracking has been quite bad lately, this is just extremely low for a project of this magnitude. Just catastrophic. Depending on the marketing budget (the production budget was $120 million), it might end up as one of the all time biggest failures.