Flasz On Film

The question on everyone’s mind whenever a new video game adaptation rolls around is whether this one will buck the trend and become a blunt instrument with which to bludgeon unsuspecting naysayers whenever they display the audacity to suggest there aren’t any formidable video game adaptations at all. Now, I am reliably informed we already have such tools (the relatively recent The Last of Us and Fallout TV shows), but as far as movies are concerned, the messiah has not arrived yet.

Well, I’m pretty sure we’re going to be waiting a while longer for that Jesus of video game movies because Borderlands isn’t going to deliver the genre from ridicule either. And this might be because—contrary to most people who stop at the “will this one be good enough for me to become insufferable at parties while I deploy it in conversation?”—video game adaptations have much bigger problems to contend with, and as far as I could tell, Borderlands epitomizes them all.

First of all, my favourite question I like to ask immediately after watching a movie—a product of my inclination towards writing about what I watch, I suppose—is “who is this movie for?” Is it made for fans of the video game franchise and literally nobody else? In which case, if you don’t like it and you haven’t played any of the games, or maybe even don’t know they exist, you might as well go and do one because you walked into the wrong neighbourhood, pal. If that’s the case, are there enough fans of the video game to make this movie a success is what I’d ask and this is mostly a question of pure and simple arithmetic. The number of fans willing to support the movie multiplied by the standard ticket price must be greater than the production and marketing budget of the movie. Much greater, to be perfectly honest. Breaking even has never been seen as a success. If the numbers on the ground indicate the movie might need support of normies who may not necessarily respond well (if at all) to fan service, then the movie needs something for them to latch onto before they make the inevitable decision to storm out of the cinema in protest while mentally forming the best snarky social media post they could muster.

“Borderlands? More like Boredomlands, amirite?” one of them might write. “Borderline-impossible-to-sit-through-lands,” another will add.

You can see how easily it could spin out of control now, can’t you?

Now, for the sake of full disclosure, I am one of those normies who have never played any of the Borderlands games, so any criticism amounting to “they totally missed the boat on the character X” or “they really messed up the plotline Y, which was much better in the game” I can only take on face value and dismiss with a shrug. You won’t find any such remarks here because I don’t have a sufficiently solid frame of reference to deliver such critiques. And perhaps even if I did, chances are I wouldn’t indulge in such criticism either because I find it tedious and lazy. But that’s besides the point.

However, I am not a total boomer, I grew up playing video games and I remain distinctly aware of the subgenre of video games Borderlands exhibits, as it follows in the tradition reaching back to Postal and Duke Nukem 3D, the latter of which may have been a formative PC gaming experience for me, too. So, I think I get the tone the movie and the game is after, which is lewd, satirical, corny and controllably stupid. Unfortunately, this is where problems really begin because another question I like to ask whenever dealing with what I expect to be a movie based on a video game is how does is stand on its own two feet and how it relates to the world at large which extends to what’s outside of the video game itself or servicing its fans. You see, my biggest gripe with any video game adaptation—scratch that, second biggest; I’ll touch on the biggest one in a second—is that the absolute vast majority of video games are culturally subservient to movies. They are imagined, engineered and concocted by people who distil their love and appreciation for elements of culture into an experience the user is then allowed to interact with. Wouldn’t you want to be a starship trooper marauding other worlds and dispatching monsters which look eerily similar to those you saw in James Cameron and Paul Verhoeven movies? Wouldn’t you want to be a masked vigilante patrolling the streets of New York and cleaning the world from drug-dealing vermin? Wouldn’t you want to be a most wanted race car driver? So on, so forth. The whole concept of video game immersiveness benefits profoundly from distilling elements plucked out of movies because the assumption is that you—the gamer—have seen those movies and therefore you will be able to relate to those elements better when they look, sound and feel familiar.

Therefore, it is expected for video games to thrive on their perceived unoriginality because what matters is the user experience. However, the minute the video game is treated as the primary document to be translated back into the world of filmmaking, it is stripped off its element of active participation leaving only the narrative sphere. The same narrative sphere which had previously plundered the world of movies and books, distilled their essence, reconfigured and recoloured what was left and packaged into an engine for you to interact with. Therefore—though, I may come to correct my statement when I have finally caught up with The Last of Us and Fallout—video game adaptations axiomatically look unoriginal to me. Simply because they work in an artistic space which has been premeditatedly limited by what had been distilled into it when it was first formed.

To briefly digress, this is perhaps a good moment to touch on that biggest gripe of mine from a few paragraphs above, which relates to this fact. In a world where video games have become a cultural staple and whose existence is wholly subservient to movies because video game developers also happen to be movie nerds quite frequently, we run a serious risk of seeing the culture recursively iterate backwards as opposed to developing organically into completely new territories. At the extreme, I can imagine a universe where the culture has been saturated with video games built by distilling the essence of 80s and 90s movies (the most likely scenario now as video game developers are likely in the age bracket likely to have a nostalgic appreciation for this timeframe), which then in turn are adapted back into movies or even inspire filmmakers to pursue original projects inspired by them. However, they all refer (through multiple intermediaries) back to 80s and 90s movies, effectively redistilling their essence. Then, new filmmakers and game developers will come and treat those movies and games as formative to their life experience and the cycle will repeat. Thus, the culture will recursively redistill itself in an act of pop cultural incest to become an abomination inspired by an essence distilled from the essence distilled from the essence distilled from the essence of the 80s and 90s.

For those hot on the AI gimmick, imagine training a deep learning model for creating images on a set of stills from 80s and 90s movies. Produce a million images. Then, retrain the model on those images. Produce another million images. Retrain. Produce. Retrain. Produce. What you will find is that not only nothing original is ever created but the output generated by the model approaches an asymptote by exacerbating the most obvious standouts of the original training set while obliterating anything seen as an outlier. That’s the future I see when I look at video game movies as a genre.

But I digress and there are ways to combat this process even while indulging in adapting video games for cinematic treatment. After all, there’s always something interesting to find in any material, regardless of its provenance, and all it takes is a team of keen and talented people (with a sack of money, I imagine) with a good idea. And to be completely frank, Borderlands did have ample opportunities to lean into places and distinguish itself as a standout genre piece. Problem is, it didn’t.

Even reading about some of the behind-the-scenes drama surrounding the production of Borderlands should alert you to the possibility the movie might be a car crash, with extensive reshoots overseen by Tim Miller after Eli Roth departed to focus on his slasher Thanksgiving, the fact the movie sat on a shelf for a while or that it was relentlessly marketed all throughout the summer, as though the studio knew it could be a disaster and decided to double down and take a massive gamble… which ultimately didn’t pay off because the movie bombed so mercilessly that it will be counted among the least profitable movies of all time once the dust has settled.

And it bombed for a reason. It’s a bit of a mess hamstrung by its source material and pulled in too many different directions by opposing forces, which I can only expect would make a phenomenal documentary one day. However, at its core the movie settles on what I term a “Lucbessonian template” because it anchors itself in an archetypal space not too dissimilar from the one we may remember vividly from The Fifth Element. In fact, if you look closely, a lot of the production value, the humour and other extras seem to explicitly reference this movie. The guns evil henchmen soldiers wield look like carbon copies of the weapons Gary Oldman gave to his goons. The ambiance of the space fantasy is also vaguely reminiscent of what we saw in that movie. And then there’s the primary narrative drive rooted in the basic storytelling premise of a bunch of people on the hunt for a bunch of McGuffins and one of these McGuffins being a person.

Now, being a video game adaptation, Borderlands houses many more references in itself, a lot of which amount to blink-and-you-miss-it winks at the audience during infrequent moments of respite from the action. But the main plotline and the characters propelling the plot towards what I see as the inevitable conclusion disguised as a twist anyone who has seen a few space operas will be able to foretell exactly in twenty-five minutes are all distilled from a mixture containing notes of The Fifth Element, Star Wars, Mad Max, and a few more. Now, you could successfully argue that Besson’s The Fifth Element was already owing enough to George Lucas to be called a Star Wars rip-off, but it distinguished itself enough to be seen as an original addition to the genre, rather than a culturally subservient clone.

Unfortunately, I can’t extend the same courtesy here because everything—and I do mean everything—adding up to this movie is just a Lego block, plucked out of its original set and assembled together to make something which just doesn’t cohere very well. It’s nothing more than an attempt at executing a tried-and-true archetype using aesthetic means stolen from Luc Besson, all peppered with piss and fart jokes I can only expect were there in the video game, but which also may be there because Tim Miller (of the Deadpool extraction) may have had something to do with the movie. It is as though the filmmakers took the script to The Fifth Element, rubbed off a lot of the text and wrote a parody thereof with dick-and-balls jokes spliced in every now and again for shits and giggles. But it’s inescapable: the original text protrudes from beneath what Borderlands is and you can clearly see the movie was written on a previously inscribed manuscript. Technically, this movie is nothing more than a Lucbessonian palimpsest, then.

And I could honestly leave it here because I feel that palimpsest line would have made a strong ending to what I can only expect is a few thousand words on why video game movies are often terrible with very little of the actual movie mentioned. But that’s just how I roll, baby. Did you expect a review? Go elsewhere and read how Kevin Hart’s funny chops don’t cut it or how Cate Blanchett is mid.

Where was I? Ah. Yes. The movie had an opportunity do something interesting even within the parameters of being a palimpsest of The Fifth Element, especially with someone like Eli Roth at the helm, a filmmaker keenly aware of how genres can be moulded into new creations and how leaning into camp ridiculousness can be endearing and perennially entertaining. Borderlands could have become what Battle Beyond the Stars was to Star Wars—a rip-off with its own beating heart, capable of cultivating its own following… which may even be completely orthogonal to the video game fan base. You wouldn’t need to be a fan of the game to care about this movie because you’d see it as a piss-and-fart knock-off of The Fifth Element which it honestly could have been. And I don’t even think it would have taken all that much to get there because I believe Eli Roth would have understood the assignment had I explained it to him. Cheapen the sets. Ditch or “crapify” the CGI. Ask the actors to wink at the camera less frequently and embrace the camp of saying stupid things while taking them seriously. It’s that simple. At least in theory.

Maintaining self-awareness in a camp movie is a fine art and I believe it was within reach, but unfortunately, what we ended up seeing was a car crash unfolding over the course of a feature running time (admittedly, under two hours, which is a welcome surprise in the age of the bloatbuster). However, it was enough time for any film fan to sit there and ponder in silence how they could have saved their money and instead of leaving the house, just take The Fifth Element of the shelf and bask in the effortless camp of a faux space opera which Borderlands could have replicated but didn’t know how.