The 5th Wave

"The 5th Wave" opens with a close encounter of a worst kind: a huge, circular spaceship ominously looms above the Earth. It isn't long, though, before its unseen inhabitants make their presence known, bringing to the planet different waves of destruction. First, all power is cut off; then earthquakes and floods, followed by a plague and, in a final step to world domination, the ability to inhabit the bodies of Earthlings. What's a high school girl from a small town in Ohio to do?

That's the question teenager Cassie Sullivan (Chlo� Grace Moretz) faces as she hides in the woods with only a stolen machine gun for protection. How she got there is explained in a clipped, efficient fashion in a flashback that suggests this latest YA dystopian franchise has promise. (The film is said to be the first in a trilogy.) Early on director J Blakeson, working for a script by Susannah Grant, Akiva Goldsman and Jeff Pinkner from Rick Yancey's successful YA novels, supplies some eye-filling visuals (a jet crashing in a suburban town; a huge tsunami hitting Miami Beach) and nicely suggests the anxiety of the survivors, who include Sammy (Zackary Arthur), her younger brother, Oliver (Ron Livingston), her dad and Lisa (Maggie Siff), her mom, who dies early from the alien-induced plague. Things begin to look up for the survivors when the military, under the no-nonsense leadership of Colonel Vosch (a groan-inducing Liev Schreiber) arrives at the refugee camp that the family has retreated to; that, though, proves to be only the first-step in what is the final phase (the 5th Wave) of the alien's domination.

Cassie escapes both a massacre at the camp, in which her dad is killed, and the abduction of her brother, who is taken to a military facility to become a member of an army comprised of children recruited to fight the aliens. Her attempt to reach Sammy is fraught with danger - the aliens in their human disguises are out to kill any humans. When she's shot in the leg by a sniper, she is rescued by Evan (Alex Roe), a pretty, soft-spoken farmer with keen medical skills and a farmhouse refuge that appears to be immune from danger. At first, Cassie doesn't trust her host; but when he agrees to help her find Sammy, she warms to him. This becomes physical after she catches him bathing in a river and soon they're canoodling in an abandoned car.

The film awkwardly cuts between Cassie's story and that of Sammy's, who is undergoing military training to fight the aliens, where he is put under the command of Cassie's high school crush, Ben aka Zombie (a moody Nick Robinson). Perhaps the notion of this army of children works better on the printed page, but on screen it seems ludicrous, especially considering the gravity of the situation. You smell a rat, and the film's big reveal only reinforces the obvious. This may be the biggest problem with "The 5th Wave," which starts out intriguing and quickly becomes preposterous. Add to this a love triangle aimed to please the fourteen-year-old girl in all of us and you have a movie that had many in the preview audiences laughing at inappropriate moments.

This is unfortunate because "The 5th Wave" has potential, especially in the casting of Chlo� Grace Moretz as Cassie. If any of Hollywood's young actresses deserves a franchise of her own it is Moretz, a keenly intelligent actress who has been a stand-out in any number of divergent roles. Here she's wonderfully adept at conveying the emotional depths of her character, be it mourning her dead mom or warily coming-to-terms to the chaos around her. It's too bad that the story's loopy narrative does her and the cast in. Both Roe and Robinson provide eye candy as her romantic interests; Roe especially deserves credit for pulling off a scene when the romantic triangle comes to a head. In a moment, he's displays the skills of the Terminator crossed with the romanticism of Rhett Butler that ends in a kiss that will likely win an MTV movie award. Poor Robinson can only stand by looking dumbfounded.

Spoiler alert: perhaps because Schreiber and Maria Bello, as a butch officer whose role is to induct the teens into the army, appear so odious that the film's big twist feels so obvious. That and the fact the military appear to have power when the rest of the world is dark. No matter. The real suspense the film generates is whether of not fans of Yancey's books will come out to see the film. That will determine if the two sequels are in order. In the end, though, "The 5th Wave" leaves you nostalgic for the time when you had to look up the word "dystopian" in the dictionary - with this film, the genre has truly jumped the shark.