Eli Roth’s film Borderlands secures a very strange PG-13 rating

If we’re being honest, we looked askance at Eli Roth Border countries film for about half a decade at this point: Very popular Border countries games are, in our opinion, some of the weirdest (and often, and intentionally, most annoying) games in the world of big-budget shooters: sci-fi adventures that pride themselves on being incredibly vulgar and comedic alongside all of them. chaos. (What everyone remembers from the beginning Border countries 2for example, is when the game’s Big Bad calls you to tell you that he’s bought himself a live diamond pony, and he’s named it after you: “Butt Stallion.”)

All of this would be very difficult indeed for Roth to translate into a film – something that was shown in the film’s trailers, which featured Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ariana Greenblatt and especially Jack . Black (as the voice of the purposefully irritating robot Claptrap) all mugging like crazy to convince you how much fun they’re having, but in a not-too-embarrassing way. Any hopes that Roth was hiding the really weird stuff for a red tape trailer are now dashed, as the film received a truly unexpected rating from the MPAA this week: PG-13.

Given that every single Border countries the game (rated by the ESRB, which handles the medium) is rated M (for ages 17 and up), which is quite an interesting divergence from the film’s source material. The MPAA notes that the film received its teen-friendly rating for “intense sequences of violence and action, language and some suggestive material.” For comparison, the original Border countries sounded for “Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Mature Humor, Strong Language.” (Continuation added to “Sexual Language” and “Use Of Alcohol.”)

And, look, we get it: If you’re making a movie that’s essentially juvenile, you want to make sure actual minors can see it. (Games have an easier time of this; no one is going to fail the PSN showcase, unless your parents are narcs who have been exposed to parenting tools, perhaps. Sorry, narc kids.) But still will do Border countrieswhich has tried hard for it visually emulate Gearbox Software’s games, read like little… unlike the same titles. We will have to wait until August 9 to see if the decision paid off.