Borderlands Movie Review: The film starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, and Jamie Lee Curtis and based on the video game of the same name is in theaters from August 7.
In an era in which mainstream rhymes with adaptation and in which cinema and television respond to a market logic that exalts the audiovisual commodification of any brand, the industry demonstrates a gradually growing attention towards the video game universe, and Borderlands is the latest blatant example. Available in theaters starting August 7, the new film directed by Eli Roth - who has moved away from his usual poetics of horror, born in 2002 with Cabin Fever and continued until last year, with the highly appreciated Thanksgiving - is directly taken from the homonymous video game series, developed by Gearbox and published by 2K starting in 2009.
The live-action, written by Roth himself together with Joe Crombie, produced by Arad Productions, Lionsgate, and Picturestart and distributed in Italy by Eagle Pictures, sees the American composer Steve Jablonsky writing and directing the soundtrack, and an extravagant cast, with great experience, giving a face to the characters taken from the first two chapters of the video game: Cate Blanchett, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Hart, Ariana Greenblatt and Jack Black.
Borderlands: Hunting on Pandora
Taken away from her native land at a young age by choice of her mother, who intended only to safeguard its future, a now adult Lilith (Cate Blanchett), who in the meantime has become an expert bounty hunter, is now forced to face her past and return to Pandora, the eccentric and chaotic planet from which she comes.
Tasked by Atlas (Edgar Ramirez), the richest and most powerful magnate in the entire galaxy, to find his missing daughter, Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), the protagonist returns home and immediately finds herself having to face the hostility of a universe now adrift, the victim of its own dystopia, where degradation reigns and power is in the hands of gangs of deranged criminals.
As soon as she disembarks on the new world, Lilith runs into Claptrap, the talkative and sarcastic robot voiced by Jack Black, who hides a very deep bond with her. He is only the first of the traveling companions who will accompany the woman in the hunt for the Crypt, a mysterious place where technological treasures belonging to other universes are believed to be hidden, and for the opening of which the young Tina turns out to be fundamental.
From the first meeting with her savior, the girl shows all her boldness, like her traveling companions Roland (Kevin Hart) and Krieg (Florian Monteanu), but due to the circumstances she joins Lilith anyway. The team, which once united begins to understand Atlas' real plans and is joined along the way by the scientist Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), with whom the protagonist shares important memories.
Videogame cinematography
The desire of a certain type of cinema to propose an alternative reality, within which the audience can identify and then get lost, is perfectly absorbed by the world of video games, which more than any other industry comes close to the concept of metaverse making it credible, and palpable.
The Weekly Art therefore now sets itself the goal of increasingly integrating this branch of the audiovisual, attempting to maintain the charm and attractiveness, but while the operation seems to be successful for serial products such as for example, Arcane and The Last of Us, which can do justice to complex characters and plots woven over much longer durations than a feature film, the single film is often unable to give the viewer the same sensations and the same attachment given by the game.
In the case of Borderlands, we are confronted with characters, with whom it is difficult to empathize because they lack a narrative substrate, and with a plot that stands on its own legs but fails to involve as it would like, except perhaps for fans of the video game series, who have greater familiarity with the context.
Borderlands: evaluation and conclusion
But what fans should mainly focus on is the mood, the tone, and the cut that Eli Roth and Joe Crombie wanted to give to the film, whose main objective should be to re-propose the peculiar character of the product, which in the video game blends together sarcasm and eccentric violence.
However, where the punk aesthetics of the Suicide Squad manage to meet the post-apocalyptic atmospheres of MadMax or Escape from New York – cited by Roth himself as a model from which he drew inspiration – the result is a film that loses its effectiveness and, although we must recognize the attention to the scenography and costumes, capable of recreating the environment faithfully, must be lamented for a loss both in terms of sardonic irreverence, saved only in part by the presence of the likable Claptrap, and in terms of violence that, from the hand of Eli Roth, one would expect to be more impactful and bloody.
The director born in 1972 has tried to distance himself from his genre poetics and from horror but, despite having shown that he knows how to direct a completely different product, he has also highlighted how his cinema can enrich the movement much more when it stays close to its own strings.
The exceptional cast does not help to elevate the film to a blockbuster, as was probably the intention of the production, but rather increases a gap between the form and its content, inserting faces very familiar to us, in roles that never seem to fit them perfectly. The result is a work that, despite the premises, does not seem to demand much and that, unlike what one would expect from its author, does not dare, does not risk.
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