hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4267.txt

Episode: 4267
Title: HPR4267: Borderlands Movie Review
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4267/hpr4267.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 22:18:36

---

This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,267 for Tuesday 10 December 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Waterland's Movie Review.
It is hosted by Kebi, and is about 13 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Kebi shares his thoughts on the much-maligned Waterland's Movie.
Hello, hello, this is Kebi from the Tuxtam Podcast, and welcome to another episode of HPR.
Now, for those that know me, there'll know I'm a gamer, and I'm a particularly big fan
of the Borderlands gaming series.
So when I discovered a wee while ago that there was a film in the pipeline, it intrigued
me.
But, you know, given my past experience of games been made into films, I really didn't
have that many high hopes.
So one of the things that everybody cannot help but notice is that this film, since it
has been released, has received overwhelmingly pure critical reviews.
And let's bear one thing in mind, critical reviews are not a reflection on the entertainment
value of a film.
The Art of the Skirl, while it was very well written, and to be honest, it was actually
amazing, given the tiny budget, was actually a boring film to watch, despite being critically
acclaimed.
In fact, if you want to go hear my thoughts, you can go and hear that in HPR episode 4,257.
Now, for those of you who are planning to watch this, or want to watch it, or who are
on the fence, then I will say you can listen to this, and this is going to be a spoiler
free review.
So if you're familiar with the Borderlands series of games, then you'll know that they're
humorous, they're wacky, they're completely over the top.
So if you're expecting a realistic game that would rival something like the Call of
Duty series, then if you play Borderlands, you're going to be
totally disappointed.
However, if you're wanting a fun, run-and-gun loot or shooter, with quite cartoony graphics
and very often inappropriate humour, I wouldn't play this with any small children's ears
running around, then this is the type of thing that you'll actually enjoy.
So if you start from this premise, then I think you're going to enjoy this film and
off a lot more.
It is absolutely full of violence, full of over-the-top explosions, big, big, big guns,
very often daft and sulting sadistic humour.
So it's just like the game to be perfectly honest.
So I must admit, if I watched it, I actually chuckled my way throughout the film and actually
quite enjoyed it.
Now the main characters in the film are Lilith, Tiny Tina, Craig the Psycho, Roland,
Claptrap and Tannis.
And although I did enjoy this film, it certainly wasn't perfect.
And this is where I'm going to make my first complaints.
Some of the actors simply are not right for the roles.
If you know the game, Roland, he's a big guy in the game.
But instead, he's played by a short actor, Kevin Hart, and he's actually the butt of quite
a few short jokes throughout the film.
I mean, to me, this would have been an impossible one, but to me, somebody the size of like
Tommy Tiny Lister, he's known to play Dibo in the Friday Films and Zeus and WWF if you
were into it in the late 80s or early 90s.
He would have been far more apt in my opinion, a much bigger guy, because Roland in the
game is not small, he's a big guy.
Tannis, who's played by Jamie Lee Curtis and at 65, she was simply too old for the character.
I'm not saying that older people, of course, can't act.
I'm not saying that at all, but she's not an old character in the game.
And the other thing they kind of felt, they really felt like they left out was they didn't
really come through.
In the game, it's quite obvious there's something not right.
Whether she's got mental health issues, whether she's got, she's on the autistic spectrum,
there's something very, very clear that Tannis in the game is not of kind of sound mind
100% of the time.
You know, she has a real, what makes me say autism slightly is she's got a lack of compassion
for anything, and she doesn't really communicate very well with others, and been a teacher
I've picked up with I had in my own experience.
They didn't pick that up at all, Lilith, who's played by Kate Blanchett, again, was
far too old for the role of a vault hunter, who was supposed to be aged 27, right?
I will quote the Borderlands manual here, Lilith claims her parish came from crossing
the hotness threshold.
Any woman as good-looking as me can do what I can do, that's the official statement.
Lilith's main to be a hot character, and whilst I'm certainly not saying Kate Blanchett
is ugly, but her days of playing a 27-year-old feature woman who's main to be the eye-candy
of the film really are well and truly behind her.
Now that's not to say that all of the characters were a disaster, not at all.
Claptrap was absolutely fantastic, the portrayal of this friendly but annoying robot was absolutely
sport-on.
You had Craig, the psycho, who, that was great, big, huge, mussely guy, kind of grunted,
that's all he kind of really does anyway, tiny Tina was very well done, although I'm
going to come back to tiny Tina in a moment.
Moxie I thought was absolutely shown perfectly, older woman heavily caked in makeup with
a very well-endowed chest, which she wasn't shy about flaunting right out of the game.
I mean, even down to, I love the fact that Neon signed with the legs at the bar, that
was absolutely perfect.
Now, whilst I know that they simply couldn't have included a DVD character, there are a
few glading omissions.
I felt that two of them were Mordekheim Brick, who played a big part in the game series.
They are two of the whole time until she could play through in the first game and they
appear in the second game as well, quite heavily.
So I really felt they really should have had something, even if it was only a cameo, they
should have had something.
But the biggest omission for me anyway, by far my way, is the ever-present villain Hansom
Jack.
Why or why did they not include the one who is probably the most memorable character from
the series, with maybe the only exception they had been claptrap, you could argue for
him.
But although, to give them their due, it kind of was based around the first game and Hansom
Jack doesn't really appear until the second, but he's just such a big part.
Wait a minute, no, only the tiny Tina doesn't appear in the first, I don't think.
So no, that argument was like the window.
So yeah, they really should have had Hansom Jack, in my opinion.
And the guy, the crime guy, the bad guy, he's Atlas, who's head of the Atlas gun corporation,
he's not even a character in Borderlands, but yet he's made as one of the main characters.
But anyway, like I said, I'm not going to spoil anything.
And the last kind of negative point that I would like to highlight, and it doesn't really
ruin the story, but I just didn't like it because I knew the background.
They changed the backgrounds of two of the characters.
Lilith is in the full and misced to have come from Pandora, but according to Game Canon,
she's from the planet of Dionysus.
Okay, that's not major, but they seem to make a big thing about it in the film about
how she's from Pandora.
So I didn't like that personally, that's personal.
And another major change was tiny Tina.
According to the game, tiny Tina and her parents were sold to Iperian to become test subjects
for handsome jacks, slag mutation experiments.
And they get, they die from this, the parents, but tiny Tina man just to escape, because of
Agilene, a few granades she hides in her skirt or dress or something, and I can't remember
off top of my head, but she, and this is what kind of starts her with being a bomb fanatic.
And it's good to see they kept that part going.
And of course, once she was free and she got away, she rose revenge on flesh to keep you
meet in the second borderlands game.
However, the film makes her into a lab creation, and she's not a real child at all, but rather
she's been created from experiments, and she's kept in a cell and rolling them
Craig.
They either not escape.
Again, I'm not spoiling anything here, this is right at the start of the film.
So but overall though, right, who would I recommend this to?
Well to me personally, you've got to be a borderlands fan, either that or if you are a fan
of over the top wild, wacky kind of space shoot him up style films, this will be right
up your street as well.
If you're expecting something like that would kind of be another film from the alien franchise,
you're going to be disappointed.
It's not that type of film at all.
Think more along the lines of a much more adult themed naked gun, but on an alien planet.
It's over the top, it's wacky, it's fun, it just, it made me chuckle throughout.
I think as long as you don't go in with high hopes thinking it's going to be a
phenomenal film, then you're really as, you're going to enjoy, it's not, it's not a world
be that it's not going to be film of the year, no, I'm not saying that.
However, for any borderlands fan, there's enough there that to me made it an enjoyable
romp.
And I actually thought, I saw people criticising this online constantly about how the
humour was toilet humour all the time.
Yeah, go and play the games and you'll understand why they did that, that is very much for that.
So yeah, that's just my thoughts.
To the point that the reviews were so bad, I actually wasn't going to watch this.
However, I was in, it was pouring rain, cold November evening and I thought, I'm going
to watch this and actually I'm so glad I did.
Is it perfect?
No, not at all.
Right?
And it's been that well-panned actually that I really hope that they do make a second one
and include handsome Jack in it.
But as far as, as far as enjoyable it goes, as far as getting the borderlands theme, I
really thought that they got this spot on.
The biggest critique that I would have of it was just, I feel that they went with an
actor, purely based on who they were and they could get them, rather than the best person
for the job.
So yeah, that's the Borderlands movie.
If you're a Borderlands fan, check it out.
If you're not, I would say go and try to play some of the games first, especially with
being around kind of Black Friday and Christmas time, you're going to pick these up on deals.
I would highly recommend actually Borderlands 2.
You don't miss an awful lot from not playing Borderlands 1, get Borderlands 2 the full package
or get, actually go and get the full franchise package.
They quite often do good deals, there's a handsome collection and a few other different packs
where you get a bunch of games and a bunch of DLCs.
Certainly don't pay full price for them because they're always on offer.
Right, so I'm Carey and that was a slightly different one for me, but you've been listening
to HPR.
Please do consider contributing and of course, with it being Christmas time for many of us
around the world, especially if you are a geek, then you're probably going to get quite
a few gadget-y type things.
I would highly recommend if you can, record a wee episode on what you got and maybe give
a wee review of it because it's always fun to hear about what people got over the
face of period.
So until next time, tune in tomorrow for another amazing episode of HPR.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio does work.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcasts, you can click on our contribute link to find
out how easy it really is.
The hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by an honesthost.com, the Internet Archive
and our sings.net.
On this advice status, today's show is released on our Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
License.