The Oscar winner is joined by Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis and Jack Black in a generic video game adaptation that robs audiences of the film's most valuable ingredient: surprise.
Borderlands Movie Review: Is Eli Roth's Video Game Adaptation a Failure?
As different as they are in every other way, Hollywood studios and diehard "Borderlands" fans have one thing in common: They're both out for the loot.
You see, “Borderlands” is what’s called a “looter shooter,” meaning players battle their way through exotic worlds (in this case, the heavily guarded and treasure-rich planet Pandora) hoping to collect goodies that make their characters more powerful. Unlike movies, you can play and replay the same game an infinite number of times, and it’s never the same experience — which helps explain why “Borderlands 2,” which came out in 2011, still manages to resonate with fans after all these years.
Psychologically speaking, it’s the same principle — a variable feedback loop — that makes old ladies put coins in slot machines, young ladies swipe right on Tinder, and lab mice push a button that might yield a reward. But that stimulus-response phenomenon, as identified by B.F. Skinner, doesn’t really translate to cinema, where the only real variable is whether you get pleasure from passively consuming a trait that typically rewards a very different part of your brain.
