After being in post-production for what feels like an eternity, Eli Roth’s Borderlands movie somehow starring two Oscar winners now has a trailer.
The three minute spot introduces us to the cast of Borderlands, which has been slimmed down from the games, presumably because the storyline here is not adapting anything from the games directly at all. And that seems to be a bit of a theme here.
The main trio appears to be Lilith, played by Cate Blanchett, Roland, played by Kevin Hart, and Tiny Tina, played by Arianna Greenblatt. Of those, I think only up-and-coming star of Young Gamora and Young Ahsoka fame, Greenblatt, feels right in the part. Blanchett is a strange choice here, aging up Lilith by a significant margin, though obviously her acting chops know no bounds. I’m not sure they will be…tested to their fullest extent here. Her fellow Oscar winner is Jamie Lee-Curtis as Tannis, only glimpsed in the trailer.
Jack Black is playing Claptrap, and as much as I like him and his voicework, especially in the recent Mario film, it is very weird to have the robot sounds wildly different than the one I’ve heard for roughly 400 hours in the games.
Easily the most bizarre choice here is Kevin Hart as Roland, who neither looks, sounds nor acts like the Roland from the games, content to do his usual schtick, at least from what we can see here. It feels like he was picked to potentially give the box office a boost as he’s a high performer there, but there were a million more logical options on the table, and this makes little sense otherwise.
The spot overall is…fine. I think they’ve gotten the aesthetics down, but I am curious how they’re going to craft this story to be different than all of the games we’ve gotten, along with a cast where maybe half of them feel or look right in the roles, at best. It’s hard to judge after just three minutes, but it’s tough to see this being a hit. I could be wrong, but it’s just the vibe I’m getting, which is the same vibe I’ve had through every interview or casting announcement or teaser shot we’ve gotten from this project.
I would love a Borderlands film to be good as it’s one of my all-time favorite series which helped create one of my all-time favorite genres, the looter shooter, before it got poisoned as of late. There is supposed to be Borderlands 4 coming out at some point here, if Embracer somehow doesn’t tank it as Gearbox’s owner. We’ll see how this goes, but I’m not exactly holding my breath.
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