The Wrong Sonic Lessons Begin…

Eli Roth, the wanna-be grindhouse provocateur who gave us the decent Bruce Willis version of Death Wish, is set to helm the film adaptation of the FPS action game Borderlands for Lionsgate.

In a statement issued Thursday, Roth said all the right things:

“I’m so excited to dive into the world of Borderlandsand I could not be doing it with a better script, producing team and studio. I have a long, successful history with Lionsgate — I feel like we have grown up together and that everything in my directing career has led to a project of this scale and ambition.”

Right out of the gate, Borderlands sounds very promising.

From Wikipedia:

Borderlands is set in the distant future, at a time when various mega-corporations seek control of various planets to colonise and mine for their mineral wealth and resources. 

A quick glance at some of the artwork and gameplay videos tells me that Roth’s bloody, smashmouth style is a good fit with the game’s cyberpunk, deadtopia wasteland.

Image result for art borderlands

It reminds me of some of those Epic comics back in the 1980s. Or maybe Judge Dredd outside of the cities.

Roth could do this right.

But Did They Get The Right Writer?

Of course, Eli is correct — it does all come down the script and not just the dialogue and set-pieces. This kind of movie needs a certain tone that Hollywood has been wane to produce of late, especially with big-budget blockbusters. 

Borderlands has to be bleak, brutal and downright mean, an off-world Mad Max.

It can’t be just a more high tech version of The Book Of Eli, where the anti-hero is a really good guy down deep inside and he’s going to save… fuck all that.

The writer, Craig Mazin, wrote a lot of trash, and I mean a lot of trash including Scary Movie 4, Identity Thief and The Huntsman: Winter War before he was allowed to write and produce the very good Chernobyl HBO mini-series.

Chernobyl is absolutely bleak, brutal and mean.

A lot of times writers need to stick around eating shit in Hollywood until they are given an opportunity to do what they really want to do.

Let’s hope that Borderlands is what Craig Mazin really wants to do. 

I have a bad feeling they tapped him to write this because of gasmasks.

Image result for Chernobyl HBO