Columbia Pictures
Everyone wants to find the next big thing. In this case, I mean a movie franchise, a “guarantee” of success. It started recently with Harry Potter, but then we had the sci-fi dystopian The Hunger Games with the boom of Jennifer Lawrence, and the awful gothic fantasy Twilight. These newer ones had the “special” person who was the big hero and was often a girl, but that girl was often forced into stupid love triangles. At least Harry Potter didn’t do that. So everyone wants to be the next Twilight or Hunger Games. Guess which one this is?
The 5th Wave is based on the novel of the same name in a “planned trilogy” — the third one is due out this year. The movie starts with a scene that almost works, but makes you wince at the obviousness of it. We see a young girl named Cassie (Chloe Grace Moretz) running through a ruined area holding an assault rifle and narrating about her new terrible life. And then it’s a long flashback to that point.
It turns out Cassie was just a typical high school student with a loving family, including a dad (Ron Livingston), mom (Maggie Siff), and a younger brother Sammy (Zackary Arthur). Of course she also has a crush on high school hunk Ben Parish (Nick Robinson) but then it all goes bad. Because aliens attack! The “waves” in question are first a planet-wide EMP that knocks out all electronics, the second wave is a series of earthquake-like attacks on the coastlines, the third is a new and deadlier form of avian flu, and the fourth is the aliens taking over the bodies of humans and killing the survivors.
So… fifth wave is coming soon right?
Columbia Pictures
This is naturally a very dark way to start a movie, but it’s mostly disaster movie style, so it’s hard to get too invested. Cassie is interesting enough, with a primary purpose to protect her brother Sammy. But after they get split up, we see split up stories. One is Cassie as she tries to survive on her own, but the other is Sammy and how gets drafted to be in a weird child army led by Commander Vosch (Liev Schreiber) along with Ben Parish, who survived. The first subplot works well enough for a while, as get a few tense scenes as Cassie struggles to keep going.
The second subplot gets very weird and very silly, because the plot holes are so obvious, the twists are extremely easy to see coming. I said while watching, “Either these are mistakes or the plot is way too obvious” — it was the latter as it turns out. There are some okay scenes of bonding with the kids training to be “soldiers,” but I felt like they were a bit thin at times — although apparently the second book fleshes them out more.
Fine enough, but it’s Cassie subplot that gets really stupid. Cassie gets rescued by good looking and mysterious Evan Walker (Alex Roe), who has his own mysterious past. I don’t want to spoil the specifics, but the “Twilight meets aliens” comes suddenly with very poorly written talk of love at first sight that elicited an audible groan from the audience at my screening. The ending was a mix of “yes, we know that twist” and “are they still doing this love triangle thing?” One of the soldier kids is Ringer (Maika Monroe), who’s a caricaturish badass goth girl, but she was at least fun. But …
So Chloe Grace Moretz is pretty good here, suitably emotional at times but kickass when needed. It’s a dark movie, but she isn’t always given room to deal with the complexity of the situation. Nick Robinson, fresh off a boring performance in Jurassic World does a decent job here, and of course Liev Schreiber is good as he always tends to be. Little Zackary Arthur is very inconsistent, sometimes working well, especially in his silent acting moments, but a lot of his line readings were quite unbelievable. Child actors are often inconsistent though, so I must blame writing and direction on that one.
You know, I suppose I had very low expectations for this one, but it wasn’t as bad as I had feared. Some cool ideas and decent action scenes. A few alright character moments and many of the actors are pretty good. The writing is what takes things down, as the romantic subplot is so poor, everything else is dragged down, especially as the drama stuff takes focus. I almost want to see a sequel (very obviously setup) just to see if they can improve from here. The book has been fairly successful so who knows? Maybe this’ll be the next Twilight except with a decent budget. Or maybe not.
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