Apologies that this is not a pure gaming question, but I’d really like to hear people’s opinion on the Borderlands movie trailer and especially from people who have played the games. That’s why I’m asking here, I hope that’s ok.
The writing doesn’t seem great (forced and unfunny), but it’s just a trailer, so I don’t put a ton of stock in that. Besides, some of Borderlands’ best jokes are slow burns over the course of the game or even the franchise, so that might be why it feels a little off.
But the cast…they’re going to have to win me over.
Lilith as the lead, I’m fine with. But Cate Blanchett as Lilith I’m a little more concerned about. She’s definitely older than Lilith, yes, but that’s not the big problem; for me, I just don’t think that she has the vibe to pull off Lilith (and I don’t think she did even when she was 25). She’s got too much gravitas.
Including Tiny Tina in the main cast, I’m over the moon for. But casting Ariana Greenblatt, I just don’t see. In fairness, I don’t think I can see anybody in particular as that character; she’s so singular and wide-eyed, I don’t know if there’s a young teenager-passing actress who could pull it off. You need the 16-year-old equivalent of Helena Bonham Carter, and she’s a pretty singular person. Tina needs to be absoluely unhinged, but in a gleeful way; maybe this could be a Millie Bobby Brown role, or maybe it could be Jenna Ortega (though she might be a bit too sardonic; Emma Myers perhaps?), but I don’t know that we have any evidence of any actress in the right age range to pull off Tina.
Not including Brick or Mordecai is sad; I think Dwayne Johnson could pull off Brick decently well, and Michael Pena would’ve been a funny Mordecai, though it would be even better to bring people into those roles who we’ve never seen before.
Krieg was kind of a blank slate to begin with, so he’s no problem. Marcus, Hammerlock, Scooter, great. Jamie Lee Curtis as Tannis, fine. No major issues with any of that casting. Same with Jack Black as Claptrap; yeah, it would’ve been nicer to have the original voice actor, but I get that you want somebody with a name in that role and Black is as good as any. I would believe he’s played the game, so I trust that he understands the role.
But Kevin Hart…I mean, come on. Idris Elba was right there, and you went with Hart?
After watching the trailer, my opinions shifted slightly. Hart was actually the least of my concerns after watching the trailer; I liked his role in Jumanji, and it seems like he’s channeling that same vibe, so I think he’ll probably do fine here. And Blanchett’s performance as a more grizzled, almost Jane Lynch-ian Lilith kinda works for me.
But Tina still isn’t quite right.
All in all, if this had been the same cast in different roles (Blanchett as Captain Scarlett, retconned as a hero? Greenblatt as Gaige?) or the same roles with a different cast (Saoirse Ronan as Lilith? Kiernan Shipka as Tina?) I’d be totally down. The world feels right and the story sounds interesting, I’m mostly just worried about the dialogue and the cast.
Good grief. THAT WALL OF TEXT HAD TOO MANY SYLLABLES!! APOLOGIZE!!
AND NO F$@#ING EXPLOSIONS!?!?
Edit: those downvotes suggest some people didn’t get the reference
Some people have no class.
Or at least didn’t notice that I (the person who wrote the wall of text) wrote that reply.
No I loved it, interesting read.
You’re very kind, thank you.
I think Ashly Burch would’ve been just fine as Tiny Tina, even though she’s a full grown adult. Because, you know, she’s the actual voice actor who can channel that energy. Just age the film character up.
My issue with Ashly Burch isn’t her age so much as…has she ever done any acting before, beyond voice acting? I don’t know if that’s even a skill she has.
I’ve never seen it before so I can’t personally say how competent she is in the role, but Ashly Burch is a cast member on Mythic Quest, a live action sitcom on Apple
She got started making her own shorts, which isn’t the same as getting cast in films but it’s not nothing either
Shamelessly stolen from elsewhere, the best way to summarize my thoughts on the trailer is: “It looks like a Borderlands porn parody, but without the porn.”
Hot damn, I thought it looked like a bunch of middle aged people doing enthusiastic but slightly off cosplay, but that’s way more accurate.
I don’t watch very many movies and I’m by no means a movie critic; I think it looks terrible.
Its a trend chaser, imo.
✅️4-5 wacky characters
✅️action montage with fun music
✅️colorful explosions.
✅️rebellious teenager
✅️starring 4 names everyone knows
All tropes of previous movies that did well, but only the writing will save a movie this late to the game.
The original writer left and demanded his name be taken off the credits after they changed things. Avi Arad involved.
Not looking good.
I feel like they just completely missed on this. They tried to capture the cel-shaded style of the games but everything looks low-budget as a result. Pandora is a backwater, if you’re going to do it live action everything needs to look like it’s been sandblasted and sun-bleached for a decade and repurposed at least twice. Everything just seems too clean.
The dialogue is bad. Can’t really blame the actors for that, but I also struggle with all of them in their roles except Jack Black (I actually don’t mind that casting).
Also, unless this is set between 1 and 2, I’m not sure how Krieg and Tiny Tina ended up on an adventure with Roland and Lilith.
Randy Pitchford is a piece of shit and forced out the original Claptrap VA. Jack Black is great and I really respect him because he likes games, seems to treat fans well, and seems to care about the communities he participates in. He should not be voicing Claptrap just like Chris Pratt shouldn’t have been the voice of Mario (aside from Chris Pratt also being a piece of shit which I don’t think Jack Black is).
It just felt weird and off the whole time. Maybe I’m conditioned to be sick of the quips we saw in the preview because of the flood of super hero movies we’ve had. Maybe if I went back and replayed Borderlands I’d respond the same way. It wasn’t violent enough, it didn’t have enough explosions and bullets, the characters weren’t the models and that was jarring. It’s not cell-shaded. I got so fucking annoyed at the trite “it’s in my mouth” scene that I just don’t have a good feeling.
I’m hoping it will be a fun, mindless action movie. I’m reserving judgement other than Randy Pitchford being a piece of shit until it actually comes out.
Randy is such a piece of shit it’s wild
His commentary about why they had to nuke all the fun shit in BL3 is equally piece of shit of material. I don’t want to dig through his Twitter to find stuff. Shit was wild. I dislike a bunch of folks in the gaming industry for poor decisions. Randy’s one of very few I will always go out of my way to highlight how much of a piece of shit he is.
Nuke all the fun shit? Tell me more
People weren’t playing the game Gearbox wanted them to play the game so there were constant nerfs that fucked up everything in the meta.
This looks like a decent video about it;
I have not watched it all the wayit’s really good and covers all the junk that drove me away from BL3 as well as stuff from Wonderlands I didn’t know about.
Had to check if it’s not made by Uwe Boll. Guess in a sense he was ahead of his time as Hollywood is now doing his shtick.
He would have cheaped out with some no-name actors. He knows the kind of movies he makes.
The specific casting bugs me:
- Budget Deadshot
- Old Nami
- Hit Bunny-Girl
- Box Wheatley
- Extra #1216 from the Mad Max set
It’s just… I dunno. Doesn’t quite fit the tone from the games. But hey maybe it comes out and is surprisingly funny in it’s braindeadness.
The casting is insane (and not the good kind).
Why, in the love of God, would you look at Roland, hulking, dour, tough as nails veteran soldier whose main character trait is being completely unflappable, and think “Kevin Hart”?
What were these people smoking?
Also the bits of writing we get in the trailer are just bad. Tina doesn’t even manage to feel like a poor imitation of herself. Even with better casting (seriously, you could literally just have Ashley Burch play Tina, you’re up-aging the character anyway, what’s the harm?), there would still be none of the vibrancy of the scripts from 2 and Pre-sequel. I’m not saying those games had flawless writing, but it was fun, funny, and generally managed to land on the right side of transgressive.
Honestly, the whole thing has this really awkward “We really wanted James Gunn but couldn’t afford him” feel to it.
Oh it’s easy, they just googled “Roland voice lines” and he sounds like a perfect role for Kevin heart.
Could he pull off the borderlands 2 Roland intro? I don’t think so, but I’ve been surprised before.
What really has me saddened is the whole pisswater gully bit. Tiny Tina is a native of pandora, Roland and Lilith are not (to my knowledge). So if anything, the roles should have been entirely reversed because:
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It makes more sense.
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It’s way funnier.
Which means they’re messing with backstory of the characters to match… nothing. Because it doesn’t seem to make the writing better, and it differs from the original. It would also match Tiny Tina’s character so much better and mitigate the annoying whiny child part of the character that is just SHINING through this trailer.
Yes, that whiny child part bugged me a lot. It doesn’t fit Tina at all.
Oh, yeah, they completely failed to get what makes Tina an interesting character. She’s constantly putting up this mask of being the toughest, meanest badass who’s seen it all and done it all (all of which is an attempt to hide the fact that she’s a scared, traumatized child).
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Why, in the love of God, would you look at Roland, hulking, dour, tough as nails veteran soldier whose main character trait is being completely unflappable, and think “Kevin Hart”?
My theory is that the original casting was supposed to be The Rock, and then after that didn’t work out, some casting person was like “The Rock and Kevin Hart often work together on stuff right? Maybe we can just use him instead”. Dwayne Johnson would have basically been straight out of Central Casting for Roland.
Yeah, it comes off like an amalgamation of Suicide Squad and Guardians of the Galaxy for 12 year olds
It looks fun enough, but I’m keeping expectations low. It has a “This is what a successful, funny movie is like, right? Right?” vibe, imo.
Casting is dogshit, jokes aren’t funny, trying way too hard to be guardians of the galaxy 2, and where’s mordy/brick?
I won’t be going to theaters to see this movie. It feels forced, and the cast doesn’t inspire confidence that it’s going to be good.
I’m surprised about the cast. I like most of them in other films, but in this trailer, I can’t really explain, but it feels off.
The actors don’t look like they’re having fun. I commented in another thread that they seem to be attempting to make a Guardians of the Galaxy style movie, but chemistry between the actors and director were critical for those movies.
This is what happens when you have some combination of bad casting, a bad script, and bad direction. Even good actors have a hard time producing good work in a bad environment.
(“bad casting” in this case meaning “casting an actor who isn’t well suited to the role”)
Of all people who they could have chosen to play Claptrap… they chose Jack black.
I generally like Jack Black, but he’s completely wrong for the role.
In fact, the only one I think is ok is Tiny Tina.
Interesting. In the trailer, I don’t mind Jack Black (not sure if he is a good pick though), but I sure miss the complete insanity from Tina. That’s what made her character so crazy and fun for me (yes, that sounds weird, even for myself).
Tina looks terrible, I don’t know what you’re talking about. This movie is going to be awful.
Well, I said “ok”, which isn’t great. And it’s compared to the rest of them which are THE WORST CASTING CHOICES in a while.
I read the cast and decided that’s all I needed to know that the movie would be bad. Why use the characters if you’re not even going to get actors that fit the roles? They could have just used news characters set in the same universe.
Which would have fit just fine based on every game having new characters in addition to old ones showing up as cameos. Heck they could have named the movie borderlands 4 and have it be part of the main game continuity. It would have been right in line with how insane borderlands is. Kinda like how the nightmare before Christmas game and matrix game are part of the movie continuity.
I said this elsewhere, but essentially it looks like a “Turn your brain off” movie which kind of hits the notes that Borderlands is known for while also having a bit of a fun house mirror / “We’ve got [game] at home” feeling to it.
Overall though, it feels… forced. From the limited bits you can hear, I don’t think Jack Black really works for Claptrap (no reason to not just keep the original VA outside of “Jack Black is so in right now” or some shit); the dialog feels overly filtered, if that makes any sense… Like too many people edited it so that it achieved maximum ‘for the lolz’ (not that the first two games (the ones I actually have experience with) were the peak of writing, mind you); and I don’t have any feelings one way or the other for Kevin Hart, but for this role I think he was also a bad casting choice (but what do I know, I’ve only seen a quick trailer… maybe he nails it).
Action looks decent enough, and I do appreciate that (at least from the looks of things) they’re pushing Cate’s character as the lead.
I’ve played every BL to date, except new tales.
The writing peaked in 2, it was great in 1, it went downhill after that.
Well said, agree about Kevin Hart, I pictured Roland differently. I had this short flash where I pictured Roland as Arnold Schwarzenegger how he looked in Predator and that made me laugh. Predator was no comical film of course, but I could easily see Arnold do the Roland thing and I would find that amusing.
Seen Kevin Hart and immediately checked out. Name his last good movie/stand-up? I know Jack Black will try and hold it together but their is only so much one person can do.
I’m avoiding everything about it. video game movies are generally a misrepresentation of the source material entirely. so I never have hope for any video game movie. and borderlands is a franchise I actually really love.
and after seeing the cast, I think it’s going to be a disaster. 😭
The aesthetics are on point but the comedy seems like it’ll be forced and to be frank, Lilith is just too old
Well, Tannis too. But they apparently don’t follow the games timeline, otherwise Mordecai and Brick would be there instead of Tiny Tina and Krieg.
I mean, I understand leaving out Brick. Both Roland and Brick are not… bastions of dialogue. Both combined could be a bit much in a film. Even though he’s a fascinating character. Mordecai confuses me more. He seems like a much better straight man (comedy term, not the orientation) than Roland or Brick, and if he operates like a sniper then he makes a great diagetic narrator to move dialogue and scenes because he operates as the scout from range. Granted the CG for the bird will probably cost.
I’m sure a good chunk was they wanted more Tiny Tina, and then they added Kreig just for the reveal moment which is… a lot of dedicated screen time just to create a moment. Seeing as he barely had any time in the trailer… clearly he doesn’t shine in this film.
