The 5th Wave

A promising but deeply flawed teen-saves-the-world movie, The 5th Wave kicks off with a veritable montage of apocalypse porn, and only gets more absurd from there. Plucky Cassie (Chloe Grace Moretz, pictured) is trying to survive the latter stages (or “waves”) of an alien invasion, avoiding the humans who have been taken over by the aliens to pick off the remaining survivors. Desperately trying to get back to her brother, who’s being trained as a child soldier, she’s distracted by a handsome young man. It shakes up the YA tropes with a series of blindingly obvious twists, so much so it becomes increasingly hard to hold off the cognitive dissonance necessary to enjoy yourself. Ω ½