Jamie Lee Curtis joins Eli Roth's Borderlands movie, which continues to be baffling
Alright, Eli Roth’s Borderlands movie, what are we supposed to do with you? The basic concept seemed a little suspect, since video game movies are almost always bad and Borderlands is most certainly a “gameplay first, story second or third” kind of thing that doesn’t seem like it would automatically lend itself to a movie, and then Roth went ahead and cast Cate Blanchett—of all people—as one of the four characters you could play as in the first game (she’s a magic lady named Lilith). Then Kevin Hart joined the cast, which made a certain amount of sense because he fully embodies the madcap energy of the original games, but it turned out that he’s going to be playing against type as a straight-laced soldier guy named Roland. Now, another famous person had joined the cast, forcing us to consider the very real possibility that the combination of name recognition for the game and name recognition for the stars are going to turn this thing into a hit.
The newcomer is Jamie Lee Curtis, who Collider says has joined the cast as Tannis, an archaeologist with an extreme level of discomfort in social situations and slight tendency toward morally dubious science experiments. She wasn’t not one of the main “Vault Hunters” you could play as in the game, but she was an important ally in their quest to find a legendary stash of valuable alien artifacts hidden somewhere on the planet Pandora (which, of course, is the same name as the planet from Avatar, but that came out several years after Borderlands).
We still have some Borderlands developments to look forward to, specifically the casting for big meathead Brick, bird-friend Mordecai, and very funny/very annoying robot mascot Claptrap. Or maybe they’ll just leave Claptrap out? That would be… terrible. (If you don’t know Claptrap, just picture a Minion crossed with BB-8 and the mind of a Redditor.)