Adapting a story from one medium to another is tough. Whether the source material is a novel or a comic or a twitterthread or a game, there are many choices that need to made because while all these formats are valid, they’re also not the same, and stories need to be adapted to their new medium.
Video games often face the most difficultversion of this because in many cases the character is an avatar for the player, and redefining that character can lead to incongruities. More importantly though, it can lead to a let down in another area: expectations.
There’s no denying in 2024 that video games are art, or how popular they are. The Borderlands franchise has sold over 75 million copies total of its several titles. People love it, and with that love comes expectations that can be nearly impossible to overcome even when filmmakers are putting their all into adapting these stories. Not all game to movie adaptations are going to be great -and debatably most of them aren’t- but the important thing is that the people making film have respect for the source material, and make good adaptational choices while they’re making it.
It’s a shame, then, that the people making the Borderlands movie don’t do any of this, and instead of making any interesting choices they opt to simplytransplant the aesthetics of the game onto a standard quest story you have definitely seen a thousand times before.
Link: https://movieswetextedabout.com/borderlands-review-a-frustrating-film-full-of-wasted-potential/
Borderlands Review: A Frustrating Film Full of Wasted Potential | Movies We Texted About
