It’s taken some extra effort, but after numerous delays, the Borderlands movie has finally arrived in a whole new ecosystem for video game adaptations, one in which we no longer expect them all to automatically be terrible. Despite that, some of them will still be terrible–a bad movie is a bad movie, no matter what its source material is. Borderlands is, unfortunately, one such example. But Borderlands isn’t terrible because it’s a video game movie–a large part of the problem is actually how far it deviates from the game’s baseline in order to create a far more generic experience than it should have.
Warning: This article will contain multiple major spoilers for the Borderlands movie, including details of its ending, as well as comparisons with the plots of the games.
Aside from the costumes that the characters wear, the movie version of Borderlands–both the general experience of it as well as the story in particular–is so fundamentally different from the games in many different ways. It’s strangely light on humor, and it’s a completely bloodless PG-13 affair–before I got used to the lack of blood, the action felt unfinished because of this.
But the more substantial changes come in how the movie remixes the game’s plot and omits some of its main characters. The central idea is the same: Somewhere in the wastelands of Pandora is an ancient vault full of technology left by an extinct race of precursor aliens called the Eridians, and folks want to find it and get in there. But outside of that, everything is at least slightly different, and much of it is extremely different.
The core plot is that the head of the Atlas corporation, who is simply called Atlas the whole movie (Bob Atlas?), used some ancient alien blood he found to create his “daughter” Tiny Tina, who’s supposed to be a living key to the vault. But she’s rescued from captivity by one of Atlas’s soldiers, Roland, who takes her to Pandora. So Atlas hires Lilith to go to Pandora–her home planet–hunt down Roland, and bring back Tina.
This isn’t material from the games, really. Atlas, the person, is original to this movie–Handsome Jack, who is never even referenced in the movie, is the game character who feels like the closest equivalent because of the “villain with a magical daughter” thing, though he obviously also fills the role of the main Borderlands 1 villain, Commandant Steele. There really isn’t a neat analogue for him. Tiny Tina in the games, likewise, isn’t a magical clone and her parents are dead, and Lilith isn’t from Pandora.
Eventually, we get a core group of four characters, just like the games, with Roland, Lilith, Tiny Tina, and Krieg, a psycho who was a DLC player-character in Borderlands 2–Mordecai and Brick, the other Borderlands 1 player-characters, are nowhere to be found. The group teams up with the scientist Patricia Tannis to find the two physical keys to the vault as well as its location, and they race Atlas to get to it first. They try to use the keys and Tiny Tina to open the vault, but it doesn’t work–she’s the wrong key, apparently. The right key is Lilith, who learns right at the climax that she’s secretly a Siren with unimaginable ancient power–power that is necessary to open the vault. In the games, the Sirens and Eridians are separate types of beings, but the movie conflates them, pegging Lilith as a sort of blood heir to the Eridian legacy. It’s kind of a strange bit to use as an ending twist, since Siren is Lilith’s gameplay class and you use her Siren powers throughout the game.
So after a big CGI battle between our heroes and Atlas’s army of baddies, Lilith and Atlas both end up making it into the vault, with Atlas holding Tina at gunpoint as a hostage. But it’s not long before the tentacled creature who lives in the vault (The Destroyer) reveals itself, just as Lilith frees Tina and escapes. Atlas is dragged away, presumably to his death. The good guys hug each other and celebrate, Lilith puts on a magical fireworks display, and no one talks about what was in the vault at all.
In the games, of course, that thing in the vault is the final boss fight. It’s an extra-dimensional being known only as The Destroyer, which would eventually consume the entire universe if freed–the Eridians all died in order to seal it in the vault many eons before. When you get to the end of the game, you chase Commandant Steele and her soldiers into the Vault, only to watch them be immediately slaughtered by the monster–and then you have to fight it to keep it from escaping the vault now that it’s been unlocked. In the movie, though, they just let it eat Mr. Atlas and leave.
Does the Borderlands movie have a post-credits or mid-credits scene?
There is a brief additional bit–“scene” is too strong a word–in which Jack Black’s Claptrap dances around in front of a black background, saying a bunch of stupid stuff. For your mental and emotional health it may be best to leave the theater before this part.
Borderlands is in movie theaters now.
