SCI-FI FLICK MISSES MARK IT SHOULD HAVE MADE
Film’s promising ideas shortchanged as flawed delivery dives into parody
If you step even the tiniest bit back from accepted genre tropes, it can feel like you’re watching some weird piece of dadaist performance. At some point in The 5th Wave, you can watch a squadron of teched-out children shoot alien invaders who look like adults, and it somehow seems less ridiculous than the fact one of them is a tough-as-nails teen whose primary survival skill is having an inexhaustible supply of eyeliner in the midst of an alien apocalypse.
But hey, this is a YA property at the beginning of the 21st century: Our heroes are children, and at least a few of them have to look badass.
Those are the more benign absurdities of a promising but deeply flawed teen-saves-theworld movie, a story that picks up and either discards or mishandles more interesting ideas than even occur to most of its brethren.
It opens with our sort-of hero and narrator Cassie (Chloe Grace Moretz) scavenging through a gas station for food, water and tampons. That latter bit of fullblooded realism is the kind of subtle touch that suggests things might be a little different here. As is what happens immediately after, when a shaken, twitchy Cassie guns down a person crying for help. It’s a hell of an intro to the world she’s living in.
Naturally, the film immediately rips us back out of it to explain how she got there. Pointedly and joylessly explaining everything turns out to be this movie’s favourite thing, maybe because aliens tend to struggle with our human emotions.
In a montage of apocalypse porn, Cassie tells us about the slow-moving but devastating alien invasion, beginning with a ship in the sky and rolling through power shut-offs, massive earthquakes and genocidal pandemics, finally taking us back to “the fourth wave” of the invasion: aliens taking over human hosts and trying to pick off the few humans who remain — whom Cassie compares to roaches, in another fun touch that drops out of the sky and flits away just as quickly.
This wave hits with Cassie, her father and her brother in a refugee camp, scraping by until the army shows up, explains the score and offers to cart the children off to their big, protected military base. Cassie misses the bus, and from there we split time between her desperately trying to find her brother and her brother’s training as a child soldier.
Cassie rather quickly gets shot by one of the alien-humans, but is rescued by a buff boy with a jawline so sharp it is maintaining his perfect beard all by itself.
The descent into YA-ville sucks almost all of the weird quirks right out of The 5th Wave, instead replacing them with a series of twists that would be blindingly obvious even if the movie didn’t stop to foreshadow them every minute on the minute (“We don’t have to trust them just because they’re in a uniform” Cassie tells her dad when the army rolls up, because I guess just cutting to neon signs with plot points on them has fallen out of fashion). As they mount up, it becomes increasingly hard to hold off the cognitive dissonance necessary to enjoy yourself, to the point where the climax could almost play as a straight parody of itself.
It’s kind of stunning that a movie can accomplish that kind of shift in less than two hours. It’s almost as if the person writing it got taken over by some kind of alien halfway through.