IT’S HUNGER GAMES...WITH ALIENS!

A SLICK adaptation of Rick Yancey’s bestselling 2013 novel, The 5th Wave starts off as a sci-fi apocalypse thriller and ends up as a kind of Hunger Games-lite.

Like the book, it is notionally aimed at so-called young adults, but there is plenty to engage older adults, too.

Chloe Grace Moretz (below), who made a good fist of the title character in the 2013 remake Carrie, gets a slightly different name here — Cassie — but a similarly nightmarish predicament.

An ordinary teenager in suburban Ohio, she, along with everyone else on the planet, is suddenly taken unawares by the arrival on a massive spaceship of an alien race intent on colonising Earth, but not much interested in its inhabitants.

The sinister, unseen invaders are swiftly given a name, ‘The Others’.

They start by killing all the electricity on the planet, then launch a massive, devastating tsunami and attack humanity with an avian flu pandemic. I haven’t read the book, but I suppose it’s Yancey, rather than the screenwriters or British director J. Blakeson, who deserves most credit for cleverly tapping in to genuine human anxieties. Blakeson does a fine job, though, generating proper tension as Cassie tries to escape the fifth and final wave of attacks, whereby The Others sneakily recruit the Earth’s children (though here, of course, just American children) in their bid to exterminate the population.

There are some misjudged attempts to crank up a steamy romance between Cassie and a hunky young piece of beefcake who saves her, including one lakeside scene which, at my screening, began what we might call the sixth wave — of audible laughter through the cinema.

On the whole, though, hats off. Moretz is excellent, as are her fellow youngsters, and it’s always good to see Liev Schreiber, here playing a rugged U.S. Army commander.

As I understand it, somewhat inevitably work has already begun on the next two films in the planned trilogy.