The new action movie “Borderlands” is both out-of-nowhere and familiar. Its cast of actors includes two Academy Award winners. Its car-filled desert wastelands shamelessly resemble “Mad Max.” And its characters have been gunning, driving and wisecracking since 2009.
Until now, Borderlands has been a video game series played by millions without reaching the heights of Mario, Sonic or Minecraft. Enjoying the silly-but-sweet action-comedy doesn’t require first playing all seven mainline console and PC games. But this primer can help moviegoers land more firmly on Borderlands’s apocalyptic, dark-comedy sands.
The Premise
The alternate future of Borderlands revolves around the distant, desolate planet Pandora. Mega-corporations have set their interstellar course there in hopes of finding lucrative alien-made resources. They’ve hired unsavory crews to emigrate across space, battle local monsters and harvest whatever they can.
Eventually, the boom economy goes bust, the corporations leave (mostly) and the ne’er-do-wells stay behind to build a ramshackle civilization.
The Borderlands games, most of which were developed by Gearbox Software, revolve around hours of car-filled exploration over Pandora’s scrap-lined dunes in search of a series of vault keys. Between that lucrative mission and odd jobs along the way, players can expect plenty of comic-book-styled, shoot-everything-that-moves violence. Although the movie has its share of vault-hunting action, it is more narrowly about a group of unlikely allies who team up to search for a mysterious preteen.
The “Mad Max” movie franchise is the most obvious point of comparison for Borderlands. Pandora looks a lot like Thunderdome. Cities and villages consist of heaps of scrap and shipping containers, while the roads between towns are patrolled by shirtless, mask-wearing bandits in makeshift, fire-spewing cars.
The Action
Well before Fortnite began dominating screen time, Borderlands emerged in 2009 as an addictive amalgamation of the previous decade’s biggest gaming trends: completing quests with online friends (think World of Warcraft), shooting guns at waves of monsters (á la Halo) and gathering increasingly overpowered weapons (as popularized by Diablo).
The guns are really the beating, bloody heart of Borderlands, which uses a “cel-shaded” visual style with thick, marker-like lines on everything you see. They are doled out frequently, and most are randomly generated with macabre, Deadpool-like silliness attached. Maybe each bullet shoots its own bullets. Maybe buckshot freezes its targets before consequently setting them on fire. And if you don’t like one gun, toss it over your shoulder with a giggle; something sillier will surely follow, possibly with semiautomatic poison ooze.
That firepower matches the tone of the series, which is somewhere between the crude verbal barbs of “South Park” and the devil-may-care slapstick of “Jackass.” One brutal example: In Borderlands 2, one character stands still and begs you via maniacal screams to shoot him in the face — “not the knee, not the arm, not the spine” — then somehow giddily shouts “thank you” after you fulfill his vile request.
The movie pares these extreme content guardrails down to a PG-13 rating in a few ways. At its best, it walks back the earliest games’ most cringe-worthy approaches to humor (including ableism and crude comments about women). But while the movie has its share of gunplay, the games’ combat is far funnier and more entertaining. Gone is the increasingly wild arsenal of guns aimed at massive “Starship Troopers”-esque alien-bug hybrids; they’ve been replaced with pea shooters that meekly take down waves of faceless goons.
The Lore
Lilith and Roland
This duo appeared in the first Borderlands game as little more than outfit and superpower choices (a.k.a. “classes”), only to evolve into major players in the evolving story of Pandora, complete with their own dialogue. The movie introduces us to these characters with more immediate stakes.
Cate Blanchett’s portrayal of Lilith diverges sharply from the game lore but it’s earned, enough so that one could imagine Blanchett bending the script to her will. Between steely stares, confident combat and no-nonsense determination, Lilith’s take on the bounty hunter archetype is an instant winner, and it leads to an emotional payoff when she faces a certain destiny.
Roland, the franchise’s de facto sergeant, is best known in the games for rallying a faction of ex-soldiers to restore order on Pandora. His film incarnation is done a disservice by Kevin Hart. Gone is the ingenuity, resolve and military prowess he possesses in the games. The movie version aims guns like they’re children’s toys instead of the gun-combat swagger you might expect from a Keanu Reeves or Ving Rhames.
Claptrap
This sarcastic yellow robot is as close as Borderlands gets to a mascot. Its antenna-style arms and squat wheels articulate well enough for outlandish emoting and dance moves, and its bulletproof exterior is pushed to violent sight-gag extremes. The movie character’s voice actor, Jack Black, tunes his performance perfectly: squeaky and attention-grabbing, but always short of annoying, as he humorously cheers both for and against his allies.
Tiny Tina
This pyromaniac figures in many of the video games as an ally on the sideline who asks players to assist with errands or sets up major explosions on their behalf. (These usually come in the form of bomb-filled stuffed animals.) She has been recast in the movie as a not-quite-damsel who is wanted by both the good and bad guys for various reasons, only to give them all headaches when she sets off explosives with an earnest giggle.
Dr. Tannis
A researcher who helps the heroes reckon with Pandora’s history and emerging alien technologies, Dr. Tannis has a back story that has been rewritten for the movie more drastically than any other character’s. She now has a closer tie to Lilith’s childhood, and Jamie Lee Curtis reinterprets the character’s neurodivergent tendencies with kindness and sympathy.
Psychos
A major pox on Pandora’s local population, Psychos are a twisted cult of people obsessed with giddy violence and little else. Their allegiances are apparently easy enough for any villain to whip up, as their minds have been warped by a vault-related phenomena.
Skags
The species of half-insect, half-alien monsters that dominate each Borderlands game’s landscape are seemingly inspired by the 1997 “Starship Troopers” movie adaptation. In bad news for moviegoers, these creatures don’t appear very often in “Borderlands,” perhaps because of a tightened C.G.I. budget.
Threshers
These are ground-burrowing super-snakes that make Dune’s sandworms look cuddly. They’re a nightmare to fight in the games because of their propensity to pop out of the ground and spew toxic fluids.
Vending machines
The many weapons in Borderlands are often sold from very large vending machines, and their salespeople talk through attached radios, likely because Pandora isn’t a safe place to peddle guns and ammo.
The Games
If you have a fine time watching the movie and want more Borderlands, start with these games — they offer a rollicking time despite the poorly aged dialogue — while you wait to see whether a movie sequel is greenlit.
Borderlands
The original has aged well on a gameplay basis, especially for newcomers, and its plot aligns somewhat with the movie’s. Arrive on Pandora with a mission to discover the planet’s treasure-filled vault, take up arms and kill a variety of monsters and Psychos, either alone or with friends. The game’s scope strikes a fine balance between car-fueled exploration and easy-to-track missions on a convenient map.
Like in most Borderlands games, it is played from a first-person perspective and requires some precision to accurately shoot the weird guns. But new players can set toggles to ease their way into the gameplay, which includes incredibly satisfying visual and sound design for every weapon, enemy and biome.
Borderlands 2
This 2012 adventure, arguably the series’ peak, supercharges everything that fans liked in the first game while increasing the size, scope and variety of the adventure ahead. The heroes from the 2009 game return as speaking characters, better anchoring the plot and its stakes. The sequel also introduces two fan-favorite characters: Tiny Tina and Handsome Jack, a demented villain who would make sense in any movie sequel.
The rest
Should you find yourself bonding to the cast and events of the first two Borderlands games, ignore their conventional sequels (Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel and Borderlands 3) and try Tales From the Borderlands instead. Aside from a few puzzles and brief action moments, what is best described as an interactive TV show asks players to select dialogue options for a new pair of protagonists to see how they fare against Handsome Jack. Tales features some of the series’s best and funniest writing.
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