Joel on Film

Without giving too much away about the latter, let us only say that the opening moments and the closing ones of Worldbreaker are genuinely bold and arresting storytelling decisions. The former are obviously going to be much easier to discuss, so we’ll begin where the movie does: in an uncertain future where crab-like spider-monsters have emerged from a rift in the fabric of the universe, the men of the world have been roundly defeated in a series of hobbling wars, and women have taken up the mantle of warriors in their place. It’s likely that the worst kind of people will have a problem with the set-up behind this movie’s premise, and that’s probably a good thing.

Anyway, after establishing this world and its newfound order, screenwriter Joshua Rollins and director Brad Anderson go appreciably small with the actual story, which follows a former soldier and his daughter as they navigate the terrain of a perilous dystopia. Actually, “navigate” is a loosely defined verb in this case, because the father (played by Luke Evans), who is never named, just wants to keep his daughter Willa (Billie Boullet) safe from the terrifying beings—called “breakers”—that ravaged Earth. To do that, he’s shut them off from any glimpse of the outside world, taking refuge in a dilapidated house overlooking a great ocean.

The majority of the story takes place a year after the extended prologue, in which the girl’s also-unnamed mother (played by Milla Jovovich) mounts an operation at the head of dozens of soldiers to fight back against the breakers. Legends, which semi-officially become myths by the end of this movie, surround the attempts to annihilate them in the “before” times, when the patriarchal society that conscripted men to fight failed time and time again to even make a dent in the onslaught. Mom is forced to join the fight, leaving husband and daughter behind to fend for themselves.

The casting of Jovovich, veteran of post-apocalypses about unsettling horror creatures and their human fodder, might suggest a certain type of movie, but it’s a sign of the movie’s intelligence and respect for the audience that this doesn’t become a wall-to-wall actioner. Indeed, there’s never a single cutaway to that ongoing fight overseas, though close enough for Willa to see some explosions and to hear occasional, far-off gunfire. The point, then, is the relationship between the father and the daughter in the midst of all this and not really some genre exercise involving the aliens.

When the movie does engage with that constant threat, it adds some meat to the bones of the story, to be sure. They’re nasty buggers, wholly unlike any such recent movie monsters in memory, and worse, their attacks can cause human-breaker hybrids, with an added bonus of uncertainty. It seems that an infected human will inevitably become a hybrid, but the filmmakers smartly acknowledge an actual sense of the science involved: metabolism is important, which means that the turn happens at a different time for each person.

We see that in devastating effect all over the film, from the story constructed around the first-ever soldier (known only as “Kodiak” and tantalizingly seen only in fuzzy flashbacks, played by Chris Finlayson) to face a breaker to brief and jarring moments like one between a poor old man who has accepted his fate and a soldier who has to make a quick, punctual decision. We see it in other ways, too, which are more difficult to reveal here. The “spoiler” territory for Rollins’s screenplay is approximately the entire second half of the movie, mainly because there are genuine surprises to be had.

A subplot, for instance, sees Willa caring for a girl around her age, named Rosie (Mila Harris), who crash-landed on this island with her missing father and brother. The lengths to which the movie will go to demonstrate that it means business about the natural cruelty of this new world is all on display in this narrative thread, as Willa juggles training for a war in which she may never fight and secretively bringing Rosie food and comfort. The final moments, too, are rousing but, because of what happens, objectively terrifying in what they suggest.

In other words, Anderson expertly balances the escalation of action and combat within this dystopia and the more personal story of the parent and the child that stands in for it on a microcosmic level. Worldbreaker constantly surprises in the ways it places these characters above the action in a competition between what’s important.

Rating: *** (out of ****)