Hope can be an inspiring thing. Something that you cling to so you can get through hard times, or so you can believe that something really good will happen when a certain day occurs. You know, like when you go to a movie theater and that “big flick” that you’ve been dying to see finally happens, and it lives up to all of your expectations and more. When it came to the Borderlands Movie that dropped last year, though, the expectations were low. Incredibly low, in fact, and even then, the movie still somehow managed to sink below those hopes of the fans and all associated with the movie.
We’ll cut it a LITTLE bit of slack, as the project had been in development for years without real progress. Yet, that should’ve been a sign to “cut bait” and move on. Instead, they kept going, and the results were horrible. In fact, they were so horrible that on Reddit, someone asked just how the movie failed so badly at being like the games:
“Hey i was curious about the borderlands movie I heard people say it was bad but after watching the first 30mins I regert even thinking of watching the movie it is complete trash and not to mention why did they hire only people over the age of 50 to play younger characters.”
That’s a very good question that no one really has an answer to. One of the biggest critiques of the film was its casting, with one of the biggest issues being Kevin Hart as Roland, even though he didn’t look or sound like him, and then, in the film, didn’t act like him, as one Redditor noted:
“The first trailer (and its extremely out-of-character characters) turned me off so much that I didn’t want to (and didn’t!) watch the movie at all. Roland as an angry black man screaming at Tina not to use the very skills he brought her along for? Tina alternating between being a whiny teen and a bazooka-wielding super-acrobatic badass? Tannis being… that?”
And the complaints go on and on from there, and we don’t blame them. As many noted afterward, it was like the team behind the movie got the Cliff Notes on what the game franchise was, and then proceeded to try and “fill in the blanks” themselves, leading to disastrous results. The movie bombed, Gearbox Software got a black eye, and that black eye grew with the issues around the game they released around a year later.