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.”

  • the post of tom joad@sh.itjust.works
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    5 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.”