The reception to the Borderlands movie has me almost nostalgic, reminiscing about the days when videogame tie-ins were reliably terrible rather than half-decent. The short version is that people hate it: the longer version is that they really, really hate it. Words such as “lifeless”, “obnoxious” and “baffling” hover around it, and the only good news is that a single positive review has lifted the film’s Rotten Tomatoes score from 0% to 3%.
So it’s a bit of a mess. But things have now gone from bad to worse, as it turns out the film has even failed to credit key production staff behind one of Borderlands’ main characters. Robbie Reid, who goes by the helpful handle “Robbie Reid the Rigger”, says he worked on rigging the movie’s Claptrap model for five months straight, the process which essentially gives a CG model a skeleton that animators can then manipulate. It is obviously a crucial job and, when it comes to Claptrap, we’re talking about arguably Borderlands’ most recognisable figure.
“This time 3 years ago I was rigging the CG asset of Claptrap for the Borderlands movie,” said Reid on X. “I worked on him for 5 consecutive months. Neither I, nor the artist who modelled him (Who I worked with the entire time), got a credit for the film.”
Reid goes on to say that this is the first time such a thing has happened to him, so he’s “exceptionally lucky”, but nevertheless “it just stings that the one to finally break the streak was the last film I worked on at a studio. And for such a significant character too.”
According to the IMDB list of all cast and crew, Borderlands credits eight riggers from various disciplines (electrical, visual effects, stunts), but Reid’s name isn’t among them.
The Claptrap model Reid worked on appears to be the one used in the final movie, and Reid speculates the omission may just be because he and the artist left their former studio in 2021 and “it took the film this long to come out”. In response to someone trying to pin the blame on Randy Pitchford (!), Reed stresses this is “a common problem in the industry. Definitely not the fault of any singular person, and would be wrong to suggest this.”
The Borderlands movie is an action comedy with a stacked cast: Jack Black, Kevin Hart, Ariana Greenblatt, Jamie Lee Curtis, Florian Munteanu, and Cate Blanchett, among others. Not that it seems to have helped, with Blanchett even saying she took the role thanks to a “touch of covid madness” after doing nothing but gardening. Naturally PC Gamer is on it, and today sent hardy volunteer Joshua Wolens to watch the thing: pop back tomorrow to find out if it really is a load of old claptrap.