Borderlands proves that this video game movie trend must die

By now it is safe to say that we all know Borderland The film is a load of trash. While there are plenty of valid criticisms to be made of the film, in my opinion the worst criticism is how conventional it is. And even that is messed up.

I am not with the Borderland games, I knew a few things about it beyond notable characters like Tiny Tina, Handsome Jack, and Claptrap. I knew it was full of criticism and parodies of companies. I knew it had some incredibly stupid jokes that were so stupid they became funny. And I knew how it reveled in over-the-top violence. Even if you were in Borderland Even if you only know the bare minimum about the series, you'll probably still find the film disappointing due to its tame script and action that feels like wasted potential.

I would never Borderland Games are conventional in every way. Sure, they may look conventional now, as gaming industry trends have shifted in the past 15 years since the franchise was launched. But for their time, the Borderland Games were anything but that. And yet, Borderland The film tried to be as conventional as possible to appeal to a wide audience, and also threw in a few hackneyed and trite cliches to… I’ll be honest, I don’t know why they were put in. Why go for a simple story when the world of Borderland is anything but easy? But even then, leave it to the Borderland The film somehow botches a basic stylistic device that has been repeated to death a million times.

Fake Death: A hackneyed cliche that somehow made Borderlands even worse

We all know what a fake death is, right? It's when a main character sacrifices themselves to save another character or complete a specific job, and the characters mourn their deaths, only to then dramatically reveal that they are not dead! It's a pretty commonly used cliche that has appeared in many video games. Sometimes it's handled well, like in Xenoblade Chronicles and then you have the entire cast of Final Fantasy VII who all seem to have fake deaths until it loses all meaning. Borderlands tries to create cheap pathos with this, but botches it almost immediately.

Picture this: Our heroes, including Kevin Hart's Roland, are stuck in an underground cave system fighting hordes of psychos. The fighting is fierce and many psychos die, but despite our heroes' best efforts, it looks like they won't be able to escape. The elevator they're in has no power and the only source of power is outside the elevator. Roland, being the noble guy he is, decides to leave the elevator to activate the power, swearing that he will catch up to the heroes. We then see him use one of Tiny Tina's explosive devices to stop the psychos chasing him as the film cuts to slow motion showing Roland being overwhelmed by the psychos and going down in a blaze of glory.

And that should have been the end. This creates two different paths for the story: we can either follow the game's plot and leave Roland dead, which is ridiculous considering that Borderland would try to be game accurate, or we can add a fake death where Roland can save our heroes during the climax, which would have been cheap and clumsy, but the Borderland The film pretty much announces all of its big twists miles in advance, so that's pretty normal. But I didn't expect the film to take a third, altogether worse, path.

After the characters reach the surface and Tina mourns Roland's death, we cut to Roland, who is fine and simply shaking off the dead psychos surrounding him as he makes his way to the surface to reunite with everyone else.

Look, fake deaths aren't exactly my favorite cliche in fiction, but I'll admit they serve a purpose. They can change the dynamic of a party and make the audience think fondly of the person who sacrificed themselves for the benefit of others. But you want to know what every fake death at least accomplishes? Waiting more than a minute before it's revealed that the person isn't dead. Revealing Roland's survival undermines everything the movie was trying to accomplish with its big escape scene. If Roland was going to survive anyway, why not just have him escape with the rest of the team? The only reason I can think of is to make the movie have a cheap emotional moment it doesn't deserve.

Tropes are tools that writers are meant to use to create new scenarios and ideas, but when used so carelessly, they generate no emotional resonance. They just fill me with anger. Roland could have died, and I would have been satisfied. Roland could have appeared dramatically in the climax, and I would have been satisfied… OK, satisfied is perhaps a bit of a strong word, since it implies positive feelings, but I would have accepted it.

I wasn't expecting the film to reveal that Roland is fine so quickly, and that just made me so over the concept of fake deaths. It's a cliche used for cheap emotional thrills and immediately becomes worthless on a second viewing since we know the character survives his supposed death. So why put in a fake death if the point isn't to create false pathos? It's cheap, and it says a lot that even if Borderland tried to use it, it failed miserably. And if Borderland tries to use such a stylistic device to gain the goodwill of the audience, then that stylistic device should die until someone can use it better.

Borderlands is in theaters now.