![the 5th wave the 5th wave](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ocTTHkQZsBw/movieposter.jpg)
Taken to an army base and given the nickname Nugget, the boy is enlisted to fight the invaders in a squad led by his sister’s old crush, Ben Parish ( Jurassic World’s Nick Robinson). She’s promptly left in the dust, as the tyke wails on the back seat. In the most contrived narrative transition in the film, Cassie gets off the bus when her little brother insists she find his teddy bear. He entreats parents to put their children on buses so they can be taken away to a secure location. “Nowhere is safe anymore,” he tells her.īefore long, a reliably inscrutable Liev Schreiber rolls in at the head of a phalanx of tanks. They lob in to a nearby campsite turned tent-city, where Cassie’s father gives her a gun. Soon the family is strapping packs to their back and abandoning their house, which seems to be by-the-course in movies like this, though surely it would be most people’s last move. When the bird flu hits, Cassie’s best friend is quarantined at the local football field, never to be heard from again. A montage of computer-generated tidal waves smashing into Miami and the London Bridge and up office stairwells is terrifying and tossed off, as though Blakeson is in a hurry to get the apocalypse out of the way and on with the story. Cassie and her brother narrowly escape the rushing waters of a burst dam at home in Ohio, while coastal cities suffer the worst of it. All this is condensed by the film into a short flashback as prelude. Next come floods, then avian flu, then a ground invasion. Soon after, an electromagnetic pulse takes out the world’s power - the first phase. Director J Blakeson (behind the camera for the first time since 2009’s drum-tight The Disappearance of Alice Creed) might be making franchise bait, but he exhibits a relatively restrained reliance on spectacle, and the screenplay by Jeff Pinkner, Susannah Grant and Akiva Goldsman is light on the aphoristic earnestness that bogged down the most recent Hunger Games, or last year’s Goldsman-penned Insurgent. If that sounds tantalizingly like a retread of the sci-fi blockbuster that Moretz’s character headlined in Clouds of Sils Maria, the new film is both more engaging and just as generic as that movie-within-a-movie. Adapted from Rick Yancey’s 2013 novel, The 5 th Wave stars Chloe Grace Moretz as Cassie Sullivan, a high school student whose world is upended when aliens invade. Still, undemanding teens may buy its message of youthful empowerment.Another week, another plucky teenage girl with the fate of the world on her shoulders, buffeted by smoldering glances from two strong, yet sensitive, young men. To the movie’s credit, it contains several eye-popping scenes of alien-inspired devastation, and it eschews dystopian tropes for a more intimate, reality-based setting.īut director J Blakeson can’t quite maintain the film’s momentum while squaring its disparate parts, malleable story rules (weren’t all power sources destroyed?), hokey dialogue and a crisscross of often one-note emotions. These parallel story lines finally intersect but in a way that’s far-fetched, facile and a bit anticlimactic, despite some bone-cracking action. But can she trust him? Enough, it seems, to propel an unconvincing romance with the well-armed hunk. Wait, have we lost Cassie? In what seems a separate universe, she’s rescued from injury by a startlingly good-looking farm boy, Evan (Alex Roe), who becomes her kind of guardian angel. But it’s insufficiently mined in the clunky script by Susannah Grant (“Erin Brockovich”), Akiva Goldsman (“A Beautiful Mind”) and Jeff Pinkner (“The Amazing Spider-Man 2").
![the 5th wave the 5th wave](https://jeffreybadalblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/the-5th-wave-poster.png)
To that end, a “Soylent Green is people"-type revelation provides fleeting intrigue and a few twists. See more of Entertainment’s top stories on Facebook >īut it’s that pesky “5th wave” that surviving Buckeyes must prepare to battle - if they can only figure out what’s coming their way.
![the 5th wave the 5th wave](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/6f/79/c2/6f79c2a79896975558ec769c3943886b.jpg)
The mayhem comes in waves: an electromagnetic pulse wipes out the world’s power and water supply, earthquakes beget disastrous tsunamis, avian flu spreads like wildfire and aliens undetectably start occupying human bodies.
#The 5th wave movie#
With two subsequent books in the series, can a movie franchise be far behind? Let’s hope not.Ī landlocked Ohio suburb is apparently the Earth’s safest place after an ill-defined alien invasion wreaks havoc on every island and coastal spot on the globe. It’s the end of the world as we know it - yet again - in “The 5th Wave,” a largely silly sci-fi action-thriller with a wobbly narrative based on the bestselling young adult novel by Rick Yancey.