As is the case with every novel turned into a film, elements are cut, condensed and otherwise modified for time and to make them more cinematic. Sometimes screenwriters adapting from another source get creative, even ingenious, with these alterations. Other times, they just slash and burn to get things under two hours, and as a result, things feel rushed, mysteries are solved far too quickly, and big reveals are botched in the name of moving things along.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the ideas behind Rick Yancey’s young-adult novel THE 5TH WAVE, a fairly clever take on the alien invasion story. In fact, there are some fairly smart ideas at play, especially in the way the unseen aliens opt for the slow and steady eradication of the human species, rather than mount the typical flying saucer attack on big cities.
The first four waves involve a global EMP to knock out all power, triggering earthquakes and tsunamis to wipe out all coastal populations (including cities by lakes, apparently), and a stronger strain of the bird flu that seems to do the most damage. The final step for the aliens in this process is to come to earth in human guise and find the last remaining human pockets and knock them out entirely, and the U.S. Army has apparently set up strongholds across the country to train children to combat and kill the aliens before they do it to us.
The film THE 5TH WAVE is told from the point of view of Cassie Sullivan (Chloë Grace Moretz), a high school girl with typical high school girl concerns—cheerleading, boys and family, including younger brother Sam (Zackary Arther) and parents (Ron Livingston and Maggie Siff). We barely get to enjoy her crushing hard on football player Ben Parish (Nick Robinson, recently seen in JURASSIC WORLD), when enormous crafts appear in the skies over the earth, quietly looming, circling and generally scaring the bejeezus out of folks. The various apocalyptic events that the aliens spark do a number on Cassie’s friends and family, and before long she lands up in a refugee camp with her brother and dad.
Up until the Army arrives, I was firmly on board with this story and its approach to the alien takeover subgenre, but it seems instantaneously suspicious that the military would want to separate the children and adults. The primary faces of the military are Col. Vosch (Liev Schreiber, doing his usual brand of dark, handsome and highly suspect) and Sgt. Reznik (a wonderfully severe Maria Bello), who gives the young recruits their first look at the face of the alien invaders…sort of. She allows them to peer into special visors that show a facehugger-type creature on the brain of its victims. The kids are highly trained and disciplined to become killing machines, and I won’t lie and say it didn’t creep me out a little to see, in some cases, little kids (such as Cassie’s brother, who still sleeps with a teddy bear) at target practice.
While Sam is training, Cassie is making the slow journey to find him through the woods of her home state of Ohio. She crosses paths with Evan Walker (Alex Roe), a young man whose family has perished, and he’s managed to survive alone ever since. After tending to Cassie’s fairly severe gunshot wounds (courtesy of an alien sniper), he teaches her some handy self-defense moves and decides to accompany her in search of her brother at the base. As handsome as young Alex Roe is, this doesn’t exactly seem to be the place for a romance to blossom, but when did that ever stop anyone from shoe-horning one into just about every movie?
One of the film’s most impressive characters is Ringer, another senior-level child soldier played by IT FOLLOWS star Maika Monroe, almost unrecognizable with jet-black hair and raccoon-style eyeliner. From the second we meet her, she presents as a take-no-crap leader who won’t tolerate disrespect in any form. She makes for a good match with Ben, who has now been renamed “Zombie” (all the child soldiers have nicknames like this), who need to get a little wild and loose to be a better, more aggressive soldier, or so he’s told.
As I mentioned, there are a couple of plot twists and reveals that are both easy to predict and unspooled so rapidly that audiences don’t have a chance to soak them in or react emotionally. We know these two storylines (Cassie’s and the events with the Army) will collide at some point, so the film becomes a drawn-out waiting game, mixed with a clumsy love story.
If THE 5TH WAVE were a smarter and more patient film, it would feel like Moretz was slumming by being in it (the same could be said for many of the actors, come to think of it). She’s a gifted actor who deserves to work on something a bit more substantial. I’m not knocking sci-fi at all—there are certainly plenty of examples of intelligent science fiction lately—but this work is not that, even with three writers (Susannah Grant, Akiva Goldsman and Jeff Pinkner) on board. Director J Blakeson (THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALICE CREED) does a serviceable job keeping things moving and making the action sequences palpable, but there’s nothing especially notable about his visual sense. THE 5TH WAVE is more DIVERGENT series than HUNGER GAMES franchise, in terms of everything from special effects to emotional depth. You don’t have to get it all right to work, but you have to get most of it working for you. This one doesn’t.
