TL;DR: Worldbreaker is a gorgeously shot, thematically ambitious dystopian thriller with strong performances and fascinating ideas, but it never fully commits to its monsters, its worldbuilding, or its own narrative stakes, leaving behind a film that looks incredible and feels frustratingly incomplete.
Worldbreaker
I went into Worldbreaker genuinely excited, and that excitement wasn’t born out of hype alone. On paper, this movie hits a very specific sweet spot for me: dystopian sci-fi, survivalist training, ecological revenge monsters, and a filmmaker who once made The Machinist feel like a two-hour panic attack. That’s a dangerous cocktail in the best way. And for the first few minutes, Worldbreaker had me leaning forward like I’d just booted up a new post-apocalyptic RPG with an incredible opening cinematic.
Then the game forgot to unlock the skill tree.
Directed by Brad Anderson and written by Joshua Rollins, Worldbreaker is a movie I wanted to love. I really did. It looks phenomenal, sounds like it has something urgent to say about the environment, and is anchored by performers who know exactly how to sell emotional stakes even when the script is running on fumes. But somewhere between its jaw-dropping Northern Ireland landscapes and its final, frustratingly muted confrontation, the film forgets to actually become the dystopian thriller it’s pretending to be.
What we’re left with is a visually arresting sci-fi drama that keeps circling greatness without ever landing the kill shot.
Worldbreaker drops us into a post-apocalyptic Earth where humanity has effectively kicked the planet one time too many. The result of our environmental sins comes in the form of the Breakers, massive arachnid-like creatures that feel less like aliens and more like Earth’s immune response finally going nuclear. They’ve wiped out most of the male population, fractured civilization, and forced the survivors into isolated training camps and fortified outposts.
This is good sci-fi. Like, really good sci-fi. The kind that should immediately spark questions about biology, ecology, and moral accountability. The lore tells us the Breakers were buried beneath the Earth for centuries, trapped until industrial exploitation woke them up. That alone should be enough to fuel an entire franchise bible. Add in the concept of hybrids, infected humans who act as living scouts with shared sensory perception, and you’ve basically handed the film a narrative cheat code.
And yet, Worldbreaker barely uses it.
The Breakers themselves are treated like a rumor you keep hearing about but never actually meet. We see aftermath. We see damage. We see people reacting to them. But the creatures remain frustratingly abstract, more thematic metaphor than tangible nightmare. In a genre that lives and dies on visual storytelling, that’s a cardinal sin. This isn’t some low-budget indie hiding monsters to save money. This is a film that clearly had the resources to go harder, nastier, and weirder, but chose restraint at every turn.
Restraint can be powerful. Here, it’s just disappointing.
The emotional core of the film rests on Willa, played with earnest vulnerability by Billie Boullet, and her father, portrayed by Luke Evans in full grizzled-survivor mode. Their relationship is the strongest thing Worldbreaker has going for it, and it’s the reason I stayed invested even when the pacing started dragging like a Netflix series padded to hit eight episodes.
They live in isolation, training, surviving, telling stories about the old world like it was some lost golden age of Marvel Phase Three and affordable rent. Evans brings warmth and quiet regret to the role, the kind of dad who knows the world is broken but still believes knowledge and preparation matter. He’s not trying to be a hero. He’s trying to be useful. And that distinction carries real emotional weight.
On the other side of this fractured family is Willa’s mother, a commander leading an all-women battalion fighting the Breakers head-on, played by Milla Jovovich. Jovovich does what she always does best: she radiates competence. You believe she’s survived this world. You believe people follow her. What the film doesn’t do is give her enough space to exist beyond that archetype. She’s a symbol more than a character, which is a shame because the thematic implications of a world rebuilt by women are enormous.
Worldbreaker gestures toward those ideas but never interrogates them. The film wants credit for its progressive framing without doing the narrative labor to earn it.
A massive chunk of the runtime is devoted to training sequences. Survival drills. Weapon practice. Routine. And while I appreciate the attempt at realism, the execution feels indulgent. This is a 90-minute movie that behaves like it has three hours to burn. We watch Willa prepare for a future confrontation that, when it finally arrives, feels oddly undercooked.
It reminded me of grinding side quests in an open-world game only to discover the final boss is a quick-time event.
The environmental messaging is clear, almost aggressively so. Humanity abused the planet, and now the planet is done asking politely. There’s nothing wrong with that message. In fact, genre cinema is at its best when it weaponizes metaphor. The problem is that Worldbreaker is so focused on being didactic that it forgets to be thrilling. Anderson opts for solemnity over shock, meditation over momentum.
By the time the film circles back to its opening scene in the final moments, it feels less like poetic symmetry and more like narrative avoidance. Critical story beats are implied instead of shown. Consequences are suggested instead of felt. The ending doesn’t provoke discussion so much as it provokes frustration.
And that’s the tragedy of Worldbreaker. Beneath all the restraint and hesitation is the skeleton of a phenomenal dystopian thriller. The themes are relevant. The performances are solid. The world is visually stunning. But the film never fully commits to its own premise. It’s like watching someone build an incredible PC and then run it on low settings.
As a sci-fi geek, that hurts.
Worldbreaker isn’t bad. It’s just unfinished in spirit. It’s the kind of movie that will haunt you not because of what it did, but because of what it refused to do. And maybe that’s its most dystopian quality of all.
