Movie Review: ‘The 5th Wave’

The 5th Wave, based on the first book in the YA trilogy by Rick Yancey, stars Chloë Grace Moretz as Cassie Sullivan – a survivor of an alien invasion that has left the human populace decimated. The film, directed by J Blakeson, tries but only occasionally succeeds in challenging the YA movie throne currently occupied by films like The Hunger Games and The Divergent Series. 

The audience is told through flashbacks that Cassie was just a normal high school girl who played soccer, went to parties and liked cute boys (including Jurassic World‘s Nick Robinson) – that is until “The Others” arrived on Earth. These alien beings stay hidden on a massive ship over the planet and have a plan to eradicate humanity through a series of global purging events that they call “waves.”

Surprisingly there are very few actual aliens in this invasion flick. Sure, there are some mild Invasion of the Body Snatchers elements, but nothing all that interesting is really done with them. The film is most compelling in the early parts when the waves are unleashed on the Earth. The first wave is an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) that wipes out all electronics on the planet causing mass carnage – planes falling out of the sky, cars crashing, zero communication etc. There’s some pretty unnerving sequences and fairly well-choreographed destruction here that had my palms sweating.

From there, The 5th Wave quickly introduces us to Cassie’s family, but doesn’t really give us any insight into who they are as people. Maggie Siff (Sons of Anarchy, Billions) plays Cassie’s mom Lisa who is a nurse helping the sick during the plague that is The 2nd Wave. Ron Livingston (Office Space) plays the loving dad of Cassie and her little brother Sammy (Zackary Arthur) and does his best to protect them when things get very desperate for the human race.

As you can see, the film has plenty of fine actors filling out the adult roles, including Liev Schrieber (as intelligent and menacing as ever) as Colonel Vosch and Maria Bello as the flashy Sergeant Reznik, but all the pieces don’t ever seem to fit and even the good parts of the film still have a “been there, done that” vibe.

Once the early Waves diminish, the film comes to a grinding halt as the romance angle comes fully into play, when Cassie meets fellow survivor Evan Walker (Alex Roe) and the two do the predictable dystopian YA flirting dance while out surviving on their own. Grace Moretz is off her game in this one and seems to be emotionally uninvested quite often, even struggling to squeeze out actual tears in scene where she’s obviously fake crying.

I also have to make mention of the noticeably weird amount of times they decide to display Chloë Grace Moretz legs in this movie – so much so, they probably deserve second billing. From an early soccer scene where she’s wearing noticeably shorty shorts, to then taking every opportunity after she suffers an injury to take her pants off and stretch out her bare legs. It just happened so often, it felt like some kind of inside joke that I wasn’t in on.

Meanwhile, away from the flirty teens, Sammy gets separated from Cassie and recruited by the military to fight in Ben Parish’s (Nick Robinson, remember him from earlier?) troop under the command of Colonel Vosch and Sergeant Reznik against the oncoming 5th Wave that will spell humanity’s final doom. Yes, Cassie’s not-even-pre-teen younger brother is given advanced, high-tech equipment and expected to be a soldier with other extremely young boys and girls to save the Earth. *sigh*

So with all of these plot threads going on, the film expects you not to see a few big twists that are easily sussed out very early in the film. Not only that, but in the film’s ridiculous climax (if you can call it that), things happen off-screen that are completely glossed over, make zero sense and give no real acceptable resolution.

That last point is probably my biggest issue with the film: it’s so obviously a setup for a franchise that it doesn’t tell a complete, worthwhile story. The 5th Wave literally almost goes nowhere in advancing the overall plot of the film and that’s just unfair to the audience members who haven’t read the books and are not yet invested in the franchise and its characters.