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.”

  • watson387@sopuli.xyz
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    2 months ago

    The first Borderlands is one of my favorite games of all time. I was kind of excited when I first heard there was going to be a movie since a lot of the recent video game adaptations have been good. As soon as I saw Kevin Hart was in it I knew it was going to be a disaster.

  • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    a single positive review has lifted the film’s Rotten Tomatoes score from 0% to 3%

    See? See? It’s not that bad!

  • the post of tom joad@sh.itjust.works
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    2 months ago

    The movie sucks, but this title is just piling on, cuz this lack of credit isn’t super unusual.

    From the article:

    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.”

  • CluckN@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Damn the movie was going to be a 10/10 until this hit piece dropped.

      • EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        2 months ago

        Especially considering the frequent history of 3d workers not getting proper credit for their work and how this is basically like if a company called your previous employer and they were like, “Who? I don’t remember them.”

        The first credits for video games came in the form of hidden rooms the devs secretly added to games because the companies refused to actually give them credit for their work.

    • Nastybutler@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Well it still would help his resumè even if the movie is terrible, as long as his work was good. I get being upset about it

  • Utter_Karate [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    Is it too much to ask to have at least one great actor give a grand Shakespearian speech and give it his all because his children loved the game?

    Yes. Yes, that is entirely too much to ask and Raul Julia didn’t have to do that in 1994 either.