The First ‘Borderlands’ Movie Images Emerge And I Have Mixed Feelings

Movie adaptations of video games have a troubled history. Mostly, that involves very bad or at least deeply mediocre attempts to just use the title and aesthetics of the game and force it into some convoluted plot that misses the point of the game altogether. This has changed for the better over the years and that makes me slightly less skeptical of the upcoming Borderlands movie than I would have been a few years ago.

That being said, as someone who just isn’t a huge fan of the Borderlands games’ stories to begin with, I’m not sure I can get all that excited about the movie, either. The fact that it has such a stellar cast—it’s quite literally jam-packed with big stars—doesn’t really assuage my fears, simply because I think sometimes you get better results with lesser-known actors. I always bring up Star Wars when I talk about this. What if Star Wars had used all super famous actors from the 70s instead of introducing new names? (Yes, luminaries like Alec Guinness were there but not as the main characters).

In any case, you can see these big stars in character in the upcoming Borderlands movie below via People:

People has an image of just Cate Blanchett’s Lilith so be sure to go check that out as well. The rest of the vault-hunting outcasts in the above pic are:

Roland (Kevin Hart), Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), Krieg (Florian Munteanu), Tannis—not Half-Elven (Jamie Lee Curtis) and the endlessly, seriously won’t just ever shut-up robot Claptrap (Jack Black). Lots of big names, like I said. Of these casting choices, the most confusing is Hart who just seems more like the guy who would carry the weapons bag than the guy who would fire them, ya know? Maybe Aldis Hodge or something (or just about anybody from my list of potential Kang recasts).

Borderlands hits theaters on August 9th. I hope it’s great fun and not just bad humor and a bunch of shooting (though that would be an authentic enough adaptation of the game).

Then again, the entire franchise was built by being heavily inspired by an indie project many years ago without giving credit where it’s due, so the waters will always be a bit on the poisoned side for me.

I just like to remind people from time to time that this was Codehunters and it came out years before Borderlands with its Vault Hunters, which was a game that originally didn’t have this art-style at all.

And here’s the opening of Borderlands. See if you can spot the similarities.

You know, I think I’d just rather have a cool Codehunters movie starring totally unknown actors. But that’s not the world we live in, is it?

Hell, maybe all of this is just a ripoff of Mad Max and various dystopian anime. Nothing is original, even the original stuff.