After yesterday's first contact with Borderlands fans, critics seem to be even more disappointed. They hate it. They don't give it credit for being "so bad that it's good." All things considered, it is a truly bad movie. As of press time, it has a remarkable 3% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Borderlands will be positioned comfortably in the middle of RT's list of 100 worst movies of all-time... and first on their Worst Blockbusters of All-Time list, below even 2010's disastrous The Last Airbender.
David Fear, a reviewer at Rolling Stone, called Borderlands "an insult to moviegoers, gamers, and carbon-based living forms." Which I think is unnecessarily harsh judgment on the tastes of theoretical Silicon-Oxygen-Fluorine biochemistry life forms. They would also hate Borderlands.
Fear says, "You wonder if Borderlands' sole purpose is to make all other video game adaptations look a thousand-fold better in comparison." Fear said later that "It's a terrible waste of talent, time, and pixels." Even the joy of watching Blanchett kick asses and twirl pistols cannot save this.
Borderlands did not do well on IGN's home turf, where one might expect a videogame film to do better. Matt Donato gave it an "Awful," rating, stating that the movie failed to deliver on any of the promises made in the games. The fun locations are there, but "they're all spoonfed, familiar and as filling a single ricecake."
Even Variety couldn't find anything to love: "By 'Borderlands,' unlocking its vault, it seems that not even the characters care what's in there," said Peter Debruge.
William Bibbiani, a writer for The Wrap, has a great summary of critics' views. Bibbiani's Borderlands review highlights all the ways Borderlands tries too hard to be like better films, but fails instead of finding its own voice derived directly from the games.
Bibbiani says that the biggest problem with Eli Roth’s Borderlands is not that it’s bad, but that it’s not interesting enough to make it bad. It's mass-produced pabulum. The edges have all been sanded to make it mainstream and safe, but they went a little too far. There's not much left. It's technically an adaptation of 'Borderlands. Not much else."
We'll have to wait and see if Borderlands can live up to its lofty aspirations. But I think we're all expecting that it won't take off in the US either.
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