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| Directed by J. Blakeson Written by Akiva Goldsman, Susannah Grant, and Jeff Pinker |
Alo Party Peoples.
The jokes come too easily. It should have pleaded the Fifth instead of diluting the value of the First. It tries and fails to be the Fifth Coming of Katniss Everdeen. Everyone onstage was possessed by body snatchers themselves just before the director shouted action. The entire genre lazily follows the trends set by The Hunger Games and thus undermines its own point. They're all so terrible for mostly the same reasons that it's hard not to start grading these movies on a curve like some sort of market niche based affirmative action.
I get that I'm not the audience for these movies, I had no patience for lazy power fantasies aimed at insecure teenagers when I was one, and I certainly don't now. Hell, if it weren't for my little sister still being really into the genre, I probably wouldn't have bothered going to the advance screening for this, I'd have saved it for bad movie night with friends. I try not to hate a film based solely on genre, they all have their own scales ranging from terrible to transcendent, and there are some diamonds in the rough that is the nebulously defined genre of "young adult fiction".
The Hunger Games itself is no masterpiece, but it at least tries to tell an engaging story with fleshed out characters and a compelling point, and the backlog of John Green remains the best contemporary example of the form - but comparing that to Divergent or The Maze Runner is like comparing homemade pecan crusted tilapia to a Big Mac, they're both food, but one clearly had more thought put into it, and it's at least partially a matter of personal taste.
The 5th Wave is okay as these things go.... which is to say that it's slightly above the first Divergent but can't reach the mediocrity of Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials. It has a couple of interesting ideas to play around with, but the director and the assembled cast aren't ambitious enough to do anything with them, and as a result they have created arguably the most pandering YA film to date; The 5th Wave is literally the story of an average high school student turned regime toppling one-woman army. To wit; Chloe Grace Moretz is Cassie, an average teenager in Ohio who is witness to the arrival of the Others, which is said with such reverent tones that you can practically hear the unnecessary capital letter. For ten days they hover over the world's major cities, waiting, then they start launching several distinct Waves of attacks.
The First Wave is an electromagnetic pulse that knocks out the world's electricity (which is a genuinely gripping moment up until Cassie's internal monolouge breaks the atmosphere by spelling it out), the Second Wave is an earthquake and resulting tsunamis that destroys the world's coastlines ("in Ohio, we only have to worry about the lake, I can't imagine how bad the coasts are", Cassie's monologue gravely intones, and immediately afterwards we are shown the destruction of Boston, London and Bangkok, the show don't tell here is all over the place). The Third Wave is a plague of modified avian flu that wipes out most of the survivors, including Cassie's mother, which means that she, her father, and her kid brother Sam head to a refugee camp, where a US Army officer informs them that the Fourth Wave consists of the Others taking human form and hunting down stragglers one by one. After a confrontation with the adults results in a firefight that kills Cassie's father, the Army takes the children including Sammie to an Air Force base leading Cassie to suspect that they may not be what they seem (no prize for guessing what The Twist is), so she grabs an assault rifle and sets off in search of her brother.
So it's Invasion of the Body Snatchers mixed with Independence Day by way of an extended Twilight Zone episode. Alright, I'm down with that, there are worse starting points for a budget sci-fi movie, and there are moments when The 5th Wave sort of works. The first twenty minutes, as the Waves arrive in the fashion of Biblical plagues, would be something truly gripping if Cassie's interior monologue didn't keep interrupting them by explaining to the audience what it just saw. This is another one of those movies where if the first act was released on its own as a short film, it'd be something great. And I can respect it for almost having a point beyond "You are special because you don't fit in" with a central conceit of a world where people are unable to trust each other after a devastating attack from out of the blue leads everyone to believe that the attackers are hiding among them and could strike again at any moment.
My god, using the uneasy framework of a YA dystopia as a broad allusion to post-9/11 terrorism fears? Yes! I can totally get behind that. Sure, it's not particularly inspired as far as a Body Snatchers update goes, but when you're aiming for the same audience as Divergent this may as well be 1984! Unfortunately, the rest of the script is so uninspired and the cast so ill equipped to convey the gravity of the situation that that little nugget of brilliance makes The 5th Wave even more insulting by reminding us of what it could have been.
And that cast really is terrible; I don't know whether to call Chloe Grace Moretz a bad actress, it's probably too soon to tell just yet, and I actually kind of liked that other YA movie she did (I think it was called If I Stay), but, she's really bad in this, showing a complete inability to capture the gravity of the literal end of the world. TV actor Alex Roe shows up as one of the aliens that has decided to rebel against his upbringing by saving Cassie's life and helping her find her brother, and it's supposed to be a twist, but pretty much everyone in the audience could immediately tell that he's an alien because of how forcefully wooden his performance is. Everyone else is similarly out of their league, ranging from forgettable to mildly amusing; my little sister has class with kids that could give a better performance than the American Eagle models onstage, and she's a high school sophomore.
So it doesn't do much with its premise, and the cast kind of sucks, but maybe it at least works as a dumb action movie, right? Nope. It's surprisingly self-serious for such films, so it barely allows the action to happen, and when it does it's consistently under lit and badly choreographed, at one point the kids at the Air Force base are sent to do battle with survivors in the ruins of a non description city, and it looks like it's a recording of a Call of Duty multiplayer digital paintball match, I'm still not sure whether that's intentional or if it's the result of having no real effects budget.
Occasional flashes of inspiration keep The 5th Wave from being completely pointless, but they can't keep it from falling into the same pointless malaise of other YA films. Maybe in about seven years or so, if YA can grow up with its audience the way that Harry Potter did, maybe then we'll get something worthwhile out of it, but for now this is another one to skip.
Have a nice day.
Greg.B
FINAL RATING: 2/5
Have a nice day.
Greg.B
FINAL RATING: 2/5
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