The end of the world is an endless fount of genre stories, because there are endless ways in which to imagine our fates as the scaffolding of our daily lives crumbles. The world can end with bombs, with zombies, with sickness, and in precarious times (hello 2026), we can all imagine what we’d do when these things set in. It’s a canvas primed for just about any imagination, which means when it’s squandered, we feel that letdown.
Worldbreaker, the new film from Session 9 legend Brad Anderson, doesn’t squander its premise exactly. The ideas are there, the characters are mostly sound, and the filmmaking craft is solid. But while all the tools are in place to leverage these elements into a compelling story, Worldbreaker‘s narrative leaves any chance at an emotional payoff, or a thrill ride, or even a potent character dream in a weird state of limbo. In 90 minutes of film, it just never quite goes for it, leaving us with a movie that’s never a total failure, but also never a real success.
Years ago, the world as we know it ended when a rift known as “The Stitch” opened in the Earth, flooding the planet with giant spidery creatures known as “Breakers.” The Breakers laid waste to human civilization, infecting the male soldiers they wounded with their DNA to create awful, shambling “hybrids” of man and monster. In the present day, the original Stitch has been closed, but the Breakers keep coming, leaving women – who aren’t entirely immune to the Breakers, but fare much better than men – to fight on the front lines in a last-ditch effort to save humanity.
It’s within this setup that we meet Willa (Billie Boullet), the teenage daughter of a veteran father (Luke Evans) and a mother (Milla Jovovich) who’s still leading the charge against the Breakers. Willa knows that she’ll join the fight too one day, which is why when she and her father flee the latest battlefront to train on a deserted island in the British Isles, she’s ready to prove she has what it takes. While her mother fights, Willa learns from her father, bides her time, and aches to get out there and face the monsters head-on. Unfortunately for her, she’s about to get her wish, but not in the way she expected.
This is all fertile ground, and when the film shows us its first up-close Breaker attack, there’s a sense that we’re moving into some interesting territory. The woman-led army is a nice wrinkle in Joshua Rollins‘ script, and the sound ensign of the Hybrids, who emit a hyena-like chuckle when close, is suitably creepy. When Willa and her father retreat to their island hideaway, there’s a sense that the film is attempting to break with apocalyptic war movie tradition and deliver something more intimate, Star Wars: The Last Jedi by way of The Last of Us or something in that vicinity.
It’s here, though, that the film starts to lose its grip on what’s really compelling about this story. Willa and her father spending their days working out on makeshift obstacle courses, talking about Breakers and how to kill them, and trading stories of a mythic human folk hero known only as “Kodiak,” but it all feels very much like they’re talking around the story rather than engaging in it. The film’s frequent use of voiceover, first from Willa’s father and then Willa herself, only adds to this feeling, suspending the action in a constant sense that something is almost happening, and when something finally does, it feels like too little, too late, particularly when one of the film’s biggest emotional payoffs is telegraphed in the opening minutes.
It’s not that the film pulls its punches. It’s that it spends almost its entire runtime drawing back its fist and promising us that it will, eventually, deliver one really great punch that never lands. By the time it’s over, the film feels less like a complete narrative and more like a setup for a sequel that we might never see, only adding to the sense that this movie never quite delivers on anything.
Which is a shame, because on a craft level, everything surrounding this lackluster story is solid. Jovovich has made an entire career out of being a monster-killing badass, so her credibility is never in doubt, and Evans plays the grizzled old soldier brimming with love for his daughter quite well. Boullet, tasked with much of the film’s greatest emotional labor, is an actor with a very bright future, imbuing Willa with tremendous potential energy that the script, unfortunately, never transfers into something kinetic and impactful. And of course, we know that Anderson can deliver a beautifully shot, well-cut feature, because he’s done it before. The parts are there, but the story can’t ever get them to move in harmony.
All of that leaves Worldbreaker feeling somewhere between stale and underbaked. It plays like too many lackluster apocalyptic films before it, and when it seems like it’s finally going to swerve in a different direction, it never entirely commits. Like its lead character, a girl on the brink of battle, it’s a film trapped between inaction and the final charge, and we’re trapped right along with it.
Worldbreaker is in theaters January 30.
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