Review: Borderlands (2024)

After dwelling on the fringes of Hollywood’s illegitimate genres for nearly two decades, Eli Roth was ready to put his stamp on the summer blockbuster with Borderlands, his adaptation of the 2009 first-person shooter. Armed with massive IP, a fervent fanbase, and a top-notch cast including Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, and Jack Black, Borderlands should have been one of the summer’s biggest hits. Instead, the $120-million franchise starter has a 10% on Rotten Tomatoes and just crossed $20 million at the box office two weeks after its release. 

Amid a sea of hackneyed video game puns that say more about the irrevocably eroding quality of film criticism than the movie, one can discern that Borderlands is–to use its notices’ most frequent adjective–a “mess.” But, those of us who didn’t have the good fortune to experience 1968 firsthand just lived through the messiest summer on record. From presidential coups to Trump assassination attempts, it’s the fodder for a true artist’s magnum opus–one that no studio in a faltering Hollywood would dare produce. Thus, what’s the true artist to do, but make that video game adaptation?

As the DNC’s insistent optimism indicates, Americans are no longer quite buying the gloss. They want to grapple with the mess we’re in. And, as Roth proved with Thanksgiving and Hostel before it, he is Hollywood’s most astute social critic. 

In their search for a mystical vault on a last stand against a corrupt multi-planetary corporation, Blanchett’s no-bullshit bounty hunter, Hart’s rogue soldier, Black’s robot sidekick, Jamie Lee Curtis’s eccentric scientist, and Barbie breakout Ariana Greenblatt’s pyromaniac tween, Tiny Tina, travel the well-worn path of the franchise blockbusters that continue to define American moviegoing. However, Roth is one of the few filmmakers brave enough to make a movie about just how little mileage that formula has left. 

Rather than rest on the laurels of lore and insincere fan appeasement, Borderlands is a blockbuster unafraid to parse out the moral quandaries one encounters on the road to self-enrichment. It’s a film about duty in a sci-fi world where all signs point to an end made seemingly inevitable by an overreliance on utopia. In its postmodern portrait of a junkyard planet, it yearns for the emotional resonance that snarky pastiche and social engineering have sapped from our cultural institutions. Nothing has better captured the mess of America as it is now

Borderlands is now playing in theaters.