Worldbreaker

A father hides his daughter on an island and trains her to fight the "Breakers," strange monsters that emerged from a dimensional rift and overran society, while her mother leads the female-dominated resistance.

Milla Jovovich was once the highest-paid model in the world.

In 1988, at just 13, she started acting in much the same way as Brooke Shields, mostly in roles that seemed a little creepy for her age. Then, in 1993, she appeared in Richard Linklater's timeless and preeminent film about American teens, Dazed and Confused, playing Michelle Burroughs, the weirdly quiet and yet ever-present girlfriend constantly clinging to Pickford, her rich boy stoner boyfriend, in every scene. Jovovich had apparently been operating under the assumption that she had a much larger role in the film, and was shocked and upset to discover otherwise upon release.

She nearly quit acting because of this.

But then in 1997, she landed her breakthrough roles as Leeloominaï Lekatariba-Lamina-Tchaï Ekbat de Sebat, or Leeloo, a genetically-engineered supreme being of the Universe, in Luc Besson's classic French science-fiction action film, The Fifth Element.

After that, she settled into a respectable career, stretching over the past quarter of a century, as a post-apocalyptic/monster fighting bad-ass, which included starring in all 347 billion Resident Evil movies–the highest-grossing film franchise based on a video game–eventually earning herself the well-deserved title of the "reigning queen of kick-butt" in some action fan sectors.

So yeah, asking me if I want to watch a "Milla Jovavich fighting monsters" movie is a lot like asking me if I would like a beer, the answer is pretty much always... yeah, sure, why not? So that's what I did, I had a beer, and I watched this "Milla Jovavich fighting monsters" movie.

And therein lies the problem...

Worldbreaker begins with the classic post-apocalyptic movie trope of the camera slowly panning over a board of yellowing newspaper articles, blurry photos, cryptic notes, and scribbled-over maps, the whole of which speaks of the myriad horrors of the climate crisis, pandemics, and societal collapse like a gathering storm, but most of all... it speaks of monsters, of a prolonged war, and of a devastating loss.

The film then does the "Maximus walking the lines of troops" kind of thing, as we follow a women warrior through the torch-lit lines of dirty post-apocalyptic female soldiers. They're all armed with guns and swords. They salute and greet her. She is clearly their legendary leader, and they are clearly on the verge of a battle with an unknown enemy. Through the narrator's voice-over, we learn that these women are all soldiers in the fight against some monsters known as "Breakers." The usual Aliens/Quiet Place/Elevation/Arcadian/on and on for infinity, multi-legged lizard-dog meets monkey-spider kind of monster, they emerged from a fissure in the earth that they all call a "stitches" for unclear reasons. The Stitches that these Breakers crawl out of are either lead to the "Center of the Earth" or they're a portal to hell, or maybe just another dimension, this is also unclear. Wherever they're from, they're here and they've brought what is basically an extinction level event with them, as even plants and animals are in danger of dying off. As the general uses her sword to draw a line in the earth, then shouts her battle cry, leading her army into battle, the narrator explains that we are losing, and that the world has been broken many times before.

The narrator is then revealed to be a man, a father, who is telling this weirdly inappropriate story to his daughter Willa, and not just because they're clearly both currently hiding out from the Breakers in some kind of bunker, but also because the general in the story is actually Willa's mother. 

We then learn that the reason the soldiers are all women is that men initially fought the monsters, but it turns out, when the monsters scratch or bite the men, they almost immediately become a kind of infected zombie Breaker-hybrid. Soon enough, the fighting was being done by women, not just against the Breakers, but their own men. This wasn't just out of neccessity either, as they were running out of men, apparently, but also because, women can handle being scratched or bitten a couple of times without always turning into a Breaker-hybrids. This is apparently a Y chromosone thing. So, somewhat more immune to the Breaker's toxin than the average swinging dick, this gives the women plenty of time to cut off the monsters' heads, which is why they use swords and axes, as it's the only way to kill them, other than pouring tons and tons of bullets into them.

After a brief bit of birthday time for Willa with the family, we learn that the lines have crumbled before a Breaker attack, and they know need to evacuate their base. But their convoy is attacked by more Breakers en route, and it's only due to Willa's mom and her army showing up that Willa and her father survive. While her mom and the army hold back the approaching Breakers, Willa and her dad ditch the others to save themselves, and escape by boat to survive on their own on a remote island, because apparently the Breakers can't swim?

A year later, while playing on the island's coast, Willa spots a girl who has washed ashore. The girl's name is Rosie, and because she is so lonely, and despite the near constant Breaker-fighting training her dad puts her through, Willa fails to notice that Rosie is obviously hiding the fact that she has been bitten, an event known in Zombie genre fan circles as Chekov's Bite. Willa sets up a little camp for Rosie in a sea cave, where the two girls bond, telling each other their stories, over supplies that Willa pilfered from her and her father's ever-dwindling stockpile back at their camp. Rosie is the only survivor of her family, after her boat capsized. Willa lies to Rosie, telling her that she is also all alone on the island.

Soon after, Willa's father collapses, and it's revealed that he has been starving himself in order to allow Willa to have the last of their food. Weakly, he gifts her his sword and tells Willa that she is ready to survive on her own.

This turns out to not be true, as Willa immediately returns to the cave to discover that Rosie has turned into a hybrid. The Rosie-hybrid almost gets Willa, but luckily her father shows up and kills it Unfortunately, the Rosie-hybrid's screeches have alerted the breakers on the nearby mainland. It turns out, apparently the reason they were safe on the island up until now, was not because the Breakers couldn't swim, but because they don't actually see very well, and until the Rosie-hybrid screeched, they just had no idea the island was there.

Now they do.

Willa and her father flee to their boat, but they are attacked along the way, and during the fight, dad is bitten. There's a tearful goodbye, and dad promises to hold the Breakers off as Willa sails away. Unfortunately, as Willa is not ready to survive on her own, she's not strong enough to push the boat into the water. Everybody is fucked as a whole mess of Breakers come thundering over the ridge, racing toward them. Willa has no choice but to draw her sword and face the coming horde.

But then, speed boats are seen approaching! It's mom, and also a dog (maybe the last on the planet!) and a bunch of soldiers, and they're all shooting wildly despite still being actually kind of far from the beach yet, but fuck it, because then Willa raises her sword in an unearned cry of victory, and the film fades to black, ending with a quick voice-over by Willa basically telling us to not worry about it, and to just go home because the movie is done.

The End.

So, yeah... this is a really bad movie.

But Worldbreaker is one of those movies that's bad, well... mostly because it's bad... but more than anything else, it's bad because it feels like one day the cast and crew went home and didn't come back, so the producers just kind of spliced together all of the random nonsense that they had on film, and said fuck it and just put it out anyway, because they clearly didn't give a shit. And that's one of the big problems, Worldbreaker is half a movie. And it's obviously half a movie too, which means that no one involved really cared. That's my main takeaway here, clearly no one gave a shit about this film, chief amongst them, the director Brad Anderson. I saw Session 9 and The Machinist,Anderson even directed one of the episodes from the 1st season of The Peacemaker (S1E7-Stop Dragon My Heart Around), so I'm familiar with his stuff, and after watching this, there is no way you will ever convince me that he gave a shit about this film.

Nominally a story about the power of stories, the ties that bind, and believing that the children are our future, and that if you teach them well, they will lead the way, one of the other main problems here is that this film doesn't know what it wants to say about any of that. And not because the film has so much to say that everything gets all muddled up either, it's more like this movie proudly announces at the start: "This movie is about the following subjects!" And then it just kind of trails off.

I would bet anything that this film was sold on the idea that it was about women saving the world after men failed, something along the lines of Fury Road maybe, but it's like they pitched the film, sold it, and assumed that they would figure it out while banging out the script, like they thought it was going to come to them during the process, so they kept writing and writing and rewriting and melding previous ideas and versions of the script together, but then... nothing came, it didn't work out, and they all just gave up. But they had to make something, right? They'd sold the script, after all. So in the end, this is a film that dares to ask...

“What if the prologue was the whole movie?”

Poor pacing. Unfocused. Muddled. It’s all set-up, all treading water that never really gets to the good stuff. And all while seemingly believing itself to be inspiring, despite it's lack of any moments of inspiration. Worldbreaker is half assed. It's half baked. It's half done. It's dull, dull, dull. Perhaps worst of all, there’s basically zero post-apocalyptic Milla Jovavich monster fighting in this supposed post-apocalyptic Milla Jovavich monster fighter movie. Which is the whole entire problem really... Despite its suggestion otherwise, Worldbreaker isn’t actually a Milla Jovavich post-apocalyptic monster fighting movie, it’s a Luke Evans father-daughter bonding at the end of the world movie. It’s more like A Quiet Place than Resident Evil, but all around much less exciting, tense, fun, or interesting than either of them.

This was not a good movie.