It's taken some extra effort, but after numerous delays, the Borderlands movie has finally arrived in a whole new ecosystem for video game adaptations, one in which we no longer expect them all to automatically be terrible. Despite that, some of them will still be terrible--a bad movie is a bad movie, no matter what its source material is. Borderlands is, unfortunately, one such example. But Borderlands isn't terrible because it's a video game movie--a large part of the problem is actually how far it deviates from the game's baseline in order to create a far more generic experience than it should have.

Warning: This article will contain multiple major spoilers for the Borderlands movie, including details of its ending, as well as comparisons with the plots of the games.

Aside from the costumes that the characters wear, the movie version of Borderlands--both the general experience of it as well as the story in particular--is so fundamentally different from the games in many different ways. It's strangely light on humor, and it's a completely bloodless PG-13 affair--before I got used to the lack of blood, the action felt unfinished because of this.