Brad Anderson’s Worldbreaker

Monster movies never adequately explore the trauma of kaiju attacks, particularly for women and children. Instead, they are preoccupied with short-term issues like evading giant stomps and fire-breath, right? If you really think about the genre in such terms, please get help. Nevertheless, if you have, then this is the film for you. The angst and anxiety of growing up in a time of monsters is fully explored in Brad Anderson’s Worldbreaker, which opens tomorrow in theaters.

One day, the Breakers just erupted from a hole in the Earth, due to us people and our despoiling ways. The audience can’t miss that environmental message, because Willa’s “Dad,” as he is simply known, makes the point over and over through his “stories.” Subsequent Breakers manifest differently, including arriving from space or rising out of the oceans, but it is still all our collective fault—and don’t you dare forget it, you ruinous consumer, you!

Sometimes we literally become our own worst enemies, because humans infected with Breaker blood become zombie-like hive-mind Hybrids. You can kill a Breaker through decapitation but a hybrid keeps fighting until you crush its brains. Supposedly, “Kodiak,” the Breaker-fighting folk hero was the first to discover these tactics. Willa loves to hear her Dad tell Kodiak stories, because they are really stories and not Luddite sermons. They spend a good deal of time together, because he was badly injured fighting Breakers, but he didn’t turn—at least not yet.

In fact, “Mom” has become the Breaker-soldier in the family. In general, women now handle most of the fighting, because they are less likely to turn hybrid. However, Mom will need Dad to protect Willa when their shelter is overrun by Breakers. They have a family rally point on an uninhabited coastal island. However, Dad can only truly keep Willa safe as long as she maintains survival protocols.

Weirdly, Anderson and screenwriter Joshua Rollins take subject matter that traditionally lends itself to big genre spectacle and remolded it into a moody chamber drama. They only develop four characters to any real extent and two of them do not even have proper names.

Still, the father-daughter relationship is often quite poignant. Luke Evans’s fierce protectiveness is really very compelling. Casting longtime genre butt-kicker Milla Jovovich is actually a masterstroke, because she brings instant credibility, in limited screentime. Admittedly, Billie Boullet’s portrayal of Willa is convincingly rash and sulky, just like a real teenager. Still, kids grow up fast when living under extreme circumstances, so it is a bit odd that Willa acts like such a contemporary teen.

Eventually, Anderson and Rollins work towards a life-affirming message, but viewers must sit through a lot of preachiness to get there. Frankly, Michael Mathews’ unfairly dismissed Love and Monsters makes the same point, but more eloquently, because of its lighter touch. In contrast, the hand is heavy throughout Worldbreaker. Anderson is an experienced genre director, who stages an impressively tense climax, but the film eludes its own monstrous monster-based nature for too long. Not sufficiently entertaining to recommend, Worldbreaker opens Friday (1/30) in New York, at the AMC Empire.