‘Mad Max’ Energy and Wacky Weapons: A Guide to Borderlands

The new action movie “Borderlands” is both out-of-nowhere and familiar. Its cast of actors includes two Academy Award winners. Its car-filled desert wastelands shamelessly resemble “Mad Max.” And its characters have been gunning, driving and wisecracking since 2009.

Until now, Borderlands has been a video game series played by millions without reaching the heights of Mario, Sonic or Minecraft. Enjoying the silly-but-sweet action-comedy doesn’t require first playing all seven mainline console and PC games. But this primer can help moviegoers land more firmly on Borderlands’s apocalyptic, dark-comedy sands.

The Premise

The alternate future of Borderlands revolves around the distant, desolate planet Pandora. Mega-corporations have set their interstellar course there in hopes of finding lucrative alien-made resources. They’ve hired unsavory crews to emigrate across space, battle local monsters and harvest whatever they can.

Eventually, the boom economy goes bust, the corporations leave (mostly) and the ne’er-do-wells stay behind to build a ramshackle civilization.

The Borderlands games, most of which were developed by Gearbox Software, revolve around hours of car-filled exploration over Pandora’s scrap-lined dunes in search of a series of vault keys. Between that lucrative mission and odd jobs along the way, players can expect plenty of comic-book-styled, shoot-everything-that-moves violence. Although the movie has its share of vault-hunting action, it is more narrowly about a group of unlikely allies who team up to search for a mysterious preteen.