Crew
Director – Brad Anderson, Screenplay – Joshua Rollins, Producers – Martin Brennan, Ford Corbett, Bradley Gallo, Joshua Harris, Michael Helfant & Tracy Mercer & Jib Polhemus, Photography – Daniel Aranyo, Music – Matt Rogers, Visual Effects – MILK (Supervisor – Donal Nolan) & Sugar Studios (Supervisor – Alex Popov), Special Effects – Ignite SFX (Supervisor – Frankie Waite), Creature Effects – Millennium FX (Designer – Kate Walshe, Supervisor – Rob Mayor), Production Design – John Leslie. Production Company – Amasia Entertainment/23Ten Productions/Source Management + Production/Studio 507/Dark Castle Entertainment/Sugar Studios LA.
Cast
Billie Boullet (Willa), Luke Evans (Dad), Milla Jovovich (Mom), Mila Harris (Rosie), Kevin Glynn (Boat Ramp Man)
Plot
The world has been devastated by the emergence of Breakers, creatures that come from a rift in the ground known as The Stitch. In England, Willa is tended by her wounded father while her mother is away leading the fight against the Breakers. Men quickly succumb to any cuts from the Breakers, while women have a near invulnerability. There are also the threat of hybrids, humans that can be turned by the Breakers. Willa loves the stories her father tells, particularly of the near mythical fighter Kodiak who led the resistance against the Breakers. The Breakers now attack their compound and they are forced to evacuate. Willa and her father make it to a boat and get to the safety of a remote, uninhabited island. One year later, they are making their survival there, existing on meagre supplies as they wait for the return of Willa’s mother. As they do, Willa’s father trains her to fight back against the Breakers.
Brad Anderson is a director I have long considered undervalued. He has been quietly building one of the more interesting genre careers of the last three decades. Anderson first appeared through the indie side door with The Darian Gap (1996) and Next Stop Wonderland (1998), before making his genre debut with the charming time travel romance Happy Accidents (2000). His next film Session 9 (2001), a psycho-thriller set in an abandoned asylum, gained reasonable word of mouth, as did his subsequent effort, the reality blurring The Machinist (2004) starring an anorexic Christian Bale. Anderson went onto the non-genre thriller Transsiberian (2008) and the cryptic last people on Earth film Vanishing on 7th Street (2010), before having a box-office hit with the Halle Berry psycho-thriller The Call (2013). This was followed by the 19th Century asylum horror Eliza Graves (2014), the thriller Beirut (2018), the hospital horror Fractured (2019) and the horror film Blood (2022).
Worldbreaker starts with a good deal of promise – an original looking, briefly glimpsed creature; a world that has collapsed; and a desperate rearguard war being fought against the creatures for basic survival. The opening scenes have Milla Jovovich back seemingly in Resident Evil mode as she draws a line in the sand and prepares for war against an onslaught of the creatures. Then comes the dramatic urgency of the compound being breached by the creatures and a forced evacuation. There are all manner of intriguing hints about this world – the talk of hybrids, and how men succumb but women have an immunity.
All of this seems set up to be something epical – battles with monsters, the collapse of society, a desperate fight for survival – but that is exactly what Worldbreaker is not. Even the very image of Milla Jovovich posed to go into battle against the hordes is a tease the film never delivers on. Rather than its epic battle, the film has father Luke Evans and daughter Billie Boullet flee from the action and go into hiding on a remote island.
And there the film remains for the rest of the show. We get a few scenes with Billie in training for the coming battle and various others with the two together. But really, Worldbreaker reads as a story that sets up a great conflict and tells you what it is going to be about – only to then avoid it altogether. Even the idea of Milla Jovovich as a fierce warrior is one the film abandons with we seeing nothing more of her other than a single scene return right at the end.
There is another person introduced in about the last quarter, which does add some drama. But then the film is abruptly over. You feel like there also needed to be a lot more in the way of world-building going on in terms explaining about the Breakers, The Stitch and the hybrids, why women are immune and men are not, and so on. One aspect I did quite like is the story’s sense of mythopoeia about the fierce fighter Kodiak and how the past of the familiar world we know has already become myth to Willa. What we have had promise, but really it feels someone had only filmed the prologue to the main story and chosen the least interesting elements to focus on. Or else there was the hope that Worldbreaker would be successful enough that it launched a series.
Trailer here