**SPOILER ALERT—THIS REVIEW WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS, which is why it’s a short review.** (But if you read the review you won’t care because it’s a movie you probably want to pass on, IMO.)
My wife, the Beautiful & Talented Lynne Taylor Fahnestalk, and I don’t actually go looking for Irish movies—although we do tend to give precedence to favourite Irish actors, like Brendan Gleeson, Liam Neeson (yes, I know—Ireland’s taller answer to Bruce Willis), Colin Farrell and the like. But until we saw Worldbreaker, I could safely say we liked every Irish movie (that is, about Ireland, or filmed in Ireland) we’d seen. Movies like Grabbers, In Bruges, Waking Ned Devine, The Commitments, or any Roddy Doyle film.
I tend to look at IMDB blurbs before I see a genre film to see if it sounds attractive, and sometimes watch trailers—actually, I love movie trailers, and watch a lot of them—and then, even when the description kinda leaves me cold, I go see it. After all, I have a movie column to write—and I don’t get paid for it or free movie tickets. (When I used to do “one-minute” radio reviews in Pullman, Washington for KQQQ radio, I got free movie passes.) Well, the IMDB blurb was “A father hides his daughter on an island to keep her safe while he equips her for survival and the battles ahead,” which isn’t very promising. But somewhere I found out that it was a genre film and was filmed in Ireland, which was all I needed. (After all, Grabbers [Figure 2] was an Irish genre film, and it was great!) And although I wasn’t sure who Luke Evans (Figure 1) was, it had Milla Jovovich (figures 1 & 3), and I’ve watched a ton of genre movies featuring her (beginning with The Fifth Element.
**Okay, here’s where the spoilers start.**
I’ll give you the plot first. According to this film, the world has been broken multiple times but eventually has recovered to become green again. After the last time, Mother Nature hid the Breakers way underground to “protect her most precious creations, human beings.” (What a pile of hooey!) But Man despoiled the Earth and used up its precious resources and so a “Stitch” appeared (apparently, a crack in the earth) and from it came Breakers, which are ugly, multilegged pale white creatures resembling a cross between a centaur and a spider or insect. Wherever Breakers are, all the human, animal, and plant life is killed and the earth becomes barren. Also, if a man (especially—they mostly do this to people with a “Y” chromosome) gets scratched or bitten he turns into a hybrid—a Breaker that used to be human. Men tried to fight them with all men’s weapons, but lost. Then the women—mothers, daughters, sisters—took up the fight, apparently inspired by a man named Kodiak, who is or was a giant, with an axe, who killed ten of the monsters with a single stroke! Now, Willa (Billie Boullet, Figure 4) lives in an area behind the front lines with her mother (Milla Jovovich) and father (Luke Evans). Mother is some kind of leader of the women’s brigades, and her father has a bad leg and takes care of Willa, teaching her all that she needs to know about the Breakers and Kodiak. One night the safe area is breached, and Willa and her dad have to leave—mom has to join the fight with the other women, but she says she’ll catch up. Dad knows an island where they can hide from the Breakers. So they go there. During the following year, Dad teaches Willa to fight—bullets can’t harm Breakers, so they have to be beheaded; and hybrids need to have their brains destroyed or they can telepathically call other Breakers.
Well, you can guess what happens. After Willa gets a sword from her father (who continues to teach her the legends/stories about Kodiak and about Breakers while also teaching her to fight), she finds a girl on the beach. More stuff happens, which I won’t detail here (you’ve seen movies; you can figure it out yourselves), but the movie has no real ending. We’re left with an uncertain future and an unexplained past. Luke’s acting is good, for the little he’s allowed to do; Milla’s is a walk-on; she’s done a lot more and a lot better in past films. Billie is okay, but I’m not sure I’m really convinced by her about her character. As far as the film—I can’t buy that whole legend; I can’t buy a creature—totally unknown to science today—that can’t be killed by bullets and kills everything on the planet it can reach; in fact, nothing in this movie makes any sense to me at all.
Your mileage, as usual, may vary. If you can buy it or explain it, drop me a line and explain it to me—I’d be grateful.
NOTE: This column is in no way written, edited, proofed or composed by AI, though some of my photo editing software uses it in some capacity. This is a human column and will remain so.
Did you like this column? Did you hate it? Was it rather “blah?”. Let me know on Facebook, or you could email me (stevefah at hotmail dot com). My opinion is, as always, my own, and doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of Amazing Stories or its owner, editor, publisher or other columnists. See you next time!
Steve has been an active fan since the 1970s, when he founded the Palouse Empire Science Fiction Association and the more-or-less late MosCon in Pullman, WA and Moscow, ID, though he started reading SF/F in the early-to-mid 1950s, when he was just a sprat. He moved to Canada in 1985 and quickly became involved with Canadian cons, including ConText (’89 and ’81) and VCON. He’s published a couple of books and a number of short stories, and has collaborated with his two-time Aurora-winning wife Lynne Taylor Fahnestalk on a number of art projects. As of this writing he’s the proofreader for R. Graeme Cameron’s Polar Borealis and Polar Starlight publications. He’s been writing for Amazing Stories off and on since the early 1980s. His column can be found on Amazing Stories most Fridays.
