The quest to permanently dispel the video game curse—and maybe overtake the superhero movie as the dominant popcorn entertainment genre—continues with Borderlands, Eli Roth’s take on the popular game series that debuted in 2009.
The first trailer dropped and it’s sort of a wild mess, but I also don’t hate it for two reasons: 1) the last time Cate Blanchett went full popcorn, we got Hela in Thor: Ragnarök, one of Marvel’s better villains and films; and 2) this trailer is giving Fifth Element vibes, and that’s one of my favorite sci-fi movies of all time.
They’re TRYING to deliver Guardians of the Galaxy vibes, with the same sort of rag-tag team of misfits and losers forming to steal something in space, but no, I am seeing lots of Fifth Element, and maybe a little Tank Girl if I squint. Eli Roth at his best is not a splatter gore filmmaker—though his film Thanksgiving, now streaming on Netflix, is a great throwback to the slashers of the 80s—at his best, Eli Roth is an unhinged fantasist along the lines of Luc Besson, thus the Fifth Element reference. Let’s hope for everyone’s sake, though, that Borderlands functions better than Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Besson’s most recent unhinged sci-fi fantasy.
That movie, though, failed in no small part due to bad casting. Borderlands does not look poorly cast. This is a stacked star list, staring with Cate the Great as mysterious leader-type Lilith; Kevin Hart as a former mercenary named Roland; Jack Black voicing the robot, Claptrap; Ariana Greenblatt, fresh off Barbie, as a deranged demolitionist called Tiny Tina; boxer Florian Munteanu as Tina Tiny’s protection, Krieg; and Jamie Lee Curtis as Dr. Tannis. Edgar Ramirez stars as the bad guy, Atlas, and Bobby Lee has a blink and you’ll miss it moment in the trailer as a new character, Larry. Also, Hayley Bennett has an unnamed role, which is probably Atlas’s daughter.
The games are fun, I never got into Borderlands as much as BioShock or Fallout, but the Borderlands series has its devoted fans, who should be happy with all the color and whizz-bang action on display in this trailer. Roth definitely has a grip on the aesthetic, and the bouncy trailer editing should play well to packed audiences in front of Dune: Part Two.
The film doesn’t come out until August, though, which is typically a softer landing, box office-wise, which says distributor Lionsgate might not be totally confident in this one. The video game curse lingered so long, even with signs of it finally lifting with the success of films like Uncharted and The Super Mario Bros. Movie, plus the prestige element added by The Last of Us, people are still understandably spooked. But for the first time, video game movies don’t look like an automatic kiss of death.
