I always sort of feel bad for films that people use to calibrate the zero point on their scale; once that consensus rips through, and all the switches get flipped down. I haven't seen it, but I have a hard time imagining that a movie that doesn't literally kill the viewer rests at some point above zero. I mention that because I'd heard it had a zero on Rotten Tomatoes! But it doesn't have a zero. It has a six! It's not much better, but… still. It isn't the other number.
Borderlands has a sorta gonzo, Troma Films-type energy, which could work as long as everybody's strapped in for that kind of ride. But I'm obsessed with the idea of lineage in media; I get super curious about the parentage of certain films, and I like to trace them all back through and that wicked town is so small that you can always find little narrative arcs and heroes' journey's attached to writers and directors.
I was surprised to find Craig Mazin attached, because Craig Mazin is fucking on right now. I first heard him associated with Chernobyl, which is horrible - not horrible like don't watch it, but… it's hard to watch. Not because it's bad. It just feels bad to watch. Then he was on that Last of Us tip, writing and directing. Before that, he was writing Scary Movie Sequels and Hangover Sequels, which is a very different energy. But all this Borderlands stuff got underway in 2015, which would situate the whole thing in that era for him. Okay? We're not done.
Then I saw that World of Reel, "my place for alternative movie news," was saying Craig removed his name from the film. They also say that he replaced it with a pseudonym, Joe Crombie. This article also suggests that Aaron Berg, Oren Uziel, Juel Taylor, Tony Rettenmaier, Zak Olkewicz, Chris Bremner and Sam Levinson are also writers on the film? Alright.
But then Craig Mazin said that Joe Crombie was not his pseudonym. As a rhetorical device, "that is not my pseudonym" is almost insuperable. You'd be surprised how quickly that stops an online research project. Elsewhere, on a subreddit dedicated to the incredible works of Joe Abercrombie, OP suggests that Joe Abercrombie was a writer on it. The next few posts disabuse him of that notion, but this is what is gonna come up when you start looking for answers.
Anyway, I haven't even seen the movie but I have spent an incredible amount of time trying to find out who wrote it! Luckily, when I mentioned that this was the theme of today's strip, Mr. Gearbox himself materialized to shed some light on the particulars. Craig Mazin "broke" the story back in the day. I learned this term from my friend Gary Whitta, with whom I have broken several stories, some beyond repair. But Joe Abercrombie did touch it, as well as a group of about twenty other writers in total. As for the use of pseudonyms to shield the creator, well, it does happen on occasion. It's a deeper rabbit hole than you might expect.
(CW)TB out.
