The Borderlands movie was so wretched that someone's made a 3-minute song just from the bad reviews

Borderlands movie promo image — (Image credit: Lionsgate)

The Borderlands movie was bad. Irredeemably bad. So bad that I am currently in the process of filing criminal charges against my editors for making me review it for PC Gamer. I take heart, though: Although my own viewing was scarily packed—prompting fears on my part the movie might be an undeserved success—it's currently in the process of bombing, and has already thrown in the towel and started making the move to streaming.

The reason for that, of course, is that I'm far from the only person who thinks the film was bad. The whole world hates the film, to the point that it sat for a long time at 0% on Rotten Tomatoes before creeping up to its current 10%. The reviews are negative, folks. Negative and numerous. So numerous, in fact, that an enterprising musician by the name of Sad Alex has made a full-on, 3-minute song just from a small sample of them.

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Where to start? First, you have to compliment her creativity. This is probably the first piece of good art the Borderlands movie has been even tangentially responsible for, and it's a fantastic idea all by itself.

Second, it's bizarrely affecting? I'm not the only one welling up, right? Sad Alex sings about all the things you could do instead of watching Borderlands with emotion you usually reserve for singing about the end of a 15-year relationship or the death of a loved one. You could play this over footage of me looking lost and forlorn in a rainstorm and it'd all make perfect sense. I'd be tempted to add it to my Apple Music library if that didn't feel somehow deranged.

Anyway, score one for the Borderlands film: Something positive finally arose from it. You probably could have written a nice song without spending tens of millions of dollars on a dumpster fire of a film, of course, but that's life: You live and learn.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.