It took some extra effort, but after numerous delays, the Borderlands movie has finally arrived in a whole new ecosystem for video game adaptations, where we no longer expect them all to be automatically terrible. Still, some of them will still be terrible – a bad movie is a bad movie, no matter what its source material is. Borderlands is, unfortunately, one such example. But Borderlands isn’t terrible because it’s a video game movie – a big part of the problem is actually how far it deviates from the game’s baseline to create a much more generic experience than it should be.

Warning: This article contains several major spoilers for the Borderlands movie, including details about the ending and comparisons to the plot of the games.

Aside from the costumes the characters wear, the film version of Borderlands – both the overall experience and the story in particular – is fundamentally different from the games in many ways. The humor is oddly minimal, and it’s a completely bloodless PG-13 affair – until I got used to the lack of blood, the plot felt unfinished because of it.

The most significant changes, however, are in how the film revamps the game’s plot and leaves out some of the main characters. The central idea is the same: Somewhere in the wastelands of Pandora is an ancient treasure trove of technology left behind by an extinct race of precursor aliens called the Eridians, and people want to find it and get in there. But other than that, everything is at least a little different, and much of it is extremely different.

The core plot is that the head of the Atlas corporation, known throughout the film as simply Atlas (Bob Atlas?), has used ancient alien blood to create his “daughter,” Tiny Tina, who is supposed to be a living key to the vault. But she is rescued from captivity by one of Atlas’ soldiers, Roland, who takes her to Pandora. So Atlas enlists Lilith to travel to Pandora – her home planet – to hunt down Roland and bring Tina back.

This isn’t actually any footage from the games. Atlas, the person, is original to that movie – Handsome Jack, who isn’t even mentioned in the movie, is the game character that seems the closest equivalent because of the “villain with a magical daughter” thing, although he obviously also fills the role of the main villain from Borderlands 1, Commandant Steele. There’s really no good analogue to him. Tiny Tina in the games isn’t a magical clone either and her parents are dead, and Lilith isn’t from Pandora.

Eventually we get a core group of four characters, just like in the games, with Roland, Lilith, Tiny Tina, and Krieg, a psychopath who was a DLC player character in Borderlands 2 – Mordecai and Brick, the other player characters from Borderlands 1, are nowhere to be found. The group teams up with scientist Patricia Tannis to find the two physical keys to the Vault as well as its location, and they race Atlas to get there first. They try to use the keys and Tiny Tina to open the Vault, but it doesn’t work – she’s apparently the wrong key. The right key is Lilith, who learns right at the climax that she’s secretly a Siren with unimaginable ancient power – power that’s necessary to open the Vault. In the games, the Sirens and Eridians are different types of beings, but the movie mixes them up and presents Lilith as a sort of blood heir to the Eridian heritage. It’s kind of weird to use that as a twist at the end, since Siren is Lilith’s game class and you use her Siren powers throughout the game.

After a major CGI battle between our heroes and Atlas’ army of villains, Lilith and Atlas both finally make it into the vault, with Atlas holding Tina hostage at gunpoint. But it’s not long before the tentacled creature that lives in the vault (the Destroyer) reveals itself, just as Lilith frees Tina and escapes. Atlas is dragged away, presumably to his death. The good guys hug and celebrate, Lilith puts on a magical fireworks display, and no one even talks about what was in the vault.

In the games, of course, this thing in the vault is the final boss fight. It’s an extra-dimensional being known only as “The Destroyer” that, if released, would consume the entire universe – all Eridians died to trap it in the vault many eons before. When you reach the end of the game, you chase Commandant Steele and her soldiers into the vault, only to watch as they are instantly slaughtered by the monster – and then you must fight it to prevent it from escaping the vault now that it’s been opened. In the movie, however, they just let it eat Mr. Atlas and disappear.

Is there a post-credits or mid-credits scene in the movie Borderlands?

There’s a brief extra part – “scene” is too strong a word – where Jack Black’s Claptrap dances around in front of a black background and says a lot of stupid stuff. For your mental and emotional health, it might be best to leave the theater before this part.

Borderlands is in theaters now.