Today, during IGN Live, we got our first real look at the Borderlands movie, and folks, I’m not sure this is going to be very good.
Based on the popular looter shooters developed by Gearbox and published by 2K Games, Borderlands was first announced all the way back in 2020. The movie is being directed by Eli Roth and has been in production hell for years now. But finally, our long national nightmare is almost over as Borderlands arrives in theaters on August 9. Sadly, I’m not sure its going to be worth the wait based on a scene released earlier today during IGN Live’s Day 1 showcase.
In the new scene, we see Roland (Kevin Hart), Lilith (Cate Blanchett), Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), Kireg (Florian Munteanu), and Claptrap (voice by Jack Black) in a dark underground facility filled with boxes and not many lights. It’s hard to see what’s happening.
This is supposed to be an action-packed sequence from a major motion picture, but it feels more like a pre-recorded skit from a so-so episode of Saturday Night Live. Enemies get shot and just fall down with no blood or gore, characters move around slowly even though this is meant to be a fast-paced sequence, and all of this is done to generic music that you’ll forget about the moment the scene ends.
It’s all IP baby. They think we are the unwashed masses with no taste or critical thinking and just consume whatever they excrete.
Close, but they genuinely think video games are a lesser medium than movies. So of course they don’t take this movie, or our standards seriously.
I think some game developers think like this too, that’s why they try to turn their games into movies, either directly or by making their games more “cinematic”.
In my opinion, not all cinematic games are trying to be movies, some do it right and preserve the essence of what game is, about others we probably not hear too much except for how bad they turn out to be
At least it’s not still just Uwe Boll making adaptations.
At the same time movies based on a recognized intellectual property tend to omit crucial pieces of character and world building, because come on, the audience is supposed to know that.
And this is how they often produce garbage that is impossible to understand if you are not in the know, and impossible to watch if you are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯