Maroc - 3RD-STRIKE.COM - A La Une - 05/Jan 02:50

Borderlands (DVD) – Movie Review

When looking back at a few decades worth of movie and series adaptations of video games, we can easily say that most of them turned out to be huge messes. Many of these projects don’t respect the source material, hire strange cast members, or generally look like cheap B-movies. Even so, with the recent Fallout series release, which proved to be amazing, we had some hopes that Borderlands would also end up as a great movie. While we don’t agree with many of the harsh online reviews, Borderlands fell prey to the aforementioned pitfalls. The story of Borderlands is actually quite simple. The movie begins with Roland (Kevin Hart) breaking out Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) from a heavily secured Atlas facility. Along for the ride is Krieg (Florian Munteanu), who just happens to be friends with Tina. Soon after, Atlas (Edgar Ramírez) recruits Lilith (Cate Blanchett) to retrieve Tina from the planet of Pandora. While hesitant at first, Lilith accepts to go back to Pandora, even though she is reluctant to return to the place she originally came from. On Pandora, she pairs up with an awkward robot named Claptrap (Jack Black) to find Tina. From here on out, it’s one action scene after another, while also uncovering the mysteries of Pandora and Lilith’s past. While the movie never truly has any ‘dull’ moments, we did feel as if the director and writers wanted to cram as many different action sequences into this movie as possible. We felt the characters weren’t properly fleshed out and that the focus was put on them going from one hectic situation to another. All of this, while never truly bothering to implement a great storyline that evolves throughout the film. Even so, while Borderlands couldn’t be classified as boring, we felt things were kept too superficial to truly care about what happened to most of the characters. Even though the casting choice proved to be odd for this specific movie adaptation, the cast members still put down great performances for the material they had to work with. Sadly, this proved to be an uphill battle, as the characters just felt off. We understand deviating from the source material for live-action adaptations, but we feel that the casting director strayed well off the beaten path. Perhaps it would have been more interesting to have unknown characters play out a story in the Borderlands universe, rather than taking beloved characters and changing them completely. Even so, Borderlands does have an impressive cast backing things up. Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Edgar Ramirez, Ariana Greenblatt, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jack Black, and quite a few others show they do have the potential to play Borderlands characters, perhaps just not the ones they are supposed to represent here. Don’t get us wrong, some characters did feel fairly interesting or even mildly accurate, but as a whole, the adaptation felt a bit messy. As far as physical releases go, Borderlands will not disappoint in terms of additional content. The DVD version of Borderlands comes with quite a few special features to plow through, even though most of them revolve around the creative process that went on behind the scenes. That being said, we do applaud publishers adding extras to physical media, as it adds some additional value to the mix. Conclusion Simply put, Borderlands isn’t a good movie at all but it’s also not as bad as many people made it out to be. If the writers had opted for an adventure in the Borderlands universe with unknown characters, we reckon the movie would not have been met with so much backlash. Sadly, completely changing beloved characters and throwing them into a rushed story doesn’t do the experience any favors. Even so, we found Borderlands to be mildly entertaining to have on in the background while we were doing menial tasks. The DVD version does come with a few extras that justify picking up a physical copy if this action flick sounds like your cup of tea.