(It’s possible that the best-selling novel, written by Rick Yancey, explains this stuff a bit better.)īut then, things go from disappointing to laughable. Nor have they built on the story’s allegorical overtones: For much of the film, we feel as if we’re watching an elaborate metaphor that hasn’t been thought through entirely.
There is pointed symbolism all over the place, but director J Blakeson and his screenwriters (which include Erin Brockovich’s Susannah Grant and A Beautiful Mind’s Akiva Goldsman) haven’t managed to balance such thematic elements with the film’s clunky attempts at action and romance.
It’s like Lord of the Flies by way of Michael Bay, only not nearly as awesome as that sounds. Children, including Cassie’s young brother Sam and her secret crush Ben Parrish (Nick Robinson), are rounded up and turned into soldiers by a group of military hard-asses led by Colonel Vosch (Liev Schreiber) and Sergeant Reznick (Maria Bello). The aliens, called “the Others,” are unseen, mysterious, which lends them a symbolic quality. Characters are dismissed with grim efficiency Cassie is quickly pulled away from her best friend as the girls look at each other from across a quarantine fence.īut gradually we lose the thread, as the world of the film begins to feel forced and cagey, like important information is being awkwardly kept away from us. The ensuing apocalypse is evocative: We see London’s Tower Bridge demolished by a tidal wave a young man stands on a terrace watching Manhattan consumed by brackish water. Soccer practice is interrupted by buzzing phones alerting the kids and coaches to the giant ships in the sky. The Cassie who kills.”įor its first half-hour or so, The 5th Wave admirably conveys the contrast between the warm, nostalgic light of Cassie’s innocence and the absurdist catastrophes that befell her and humanity. “I wonder what that Cassie would think of me now.
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That’s a hell of a thing, starting your movie with your fresh-faced teenage heroine killing an innocent, wounded man. When we first see Cassie in the film (before she flashes back to life as it was), she kills a bleeding man who seems to be reaching for a gun it turns out to be a cross. Then the power went out, tidal waves wiped out half of humanity, and bird flu took care of the rest. Cassie, as she makes clear in The 5th Wave’s opening narration, was a middle-class high-schooler, playing soccer and going to parties and texting with her BFF and lusting secretly after hunky football players before the mysterious giant alien ships started hovering above Earth. That “pumpkin” makes the line ridiculous, but it’s also the word that sells the overall conceit of a seeming lyordinary girl’s life being transformed forever.Ī lot of YA stories focus on characters who were outcasts or outsiders to begin with (Katniss in The Hunger Games being a prime example). It’s a movie not just about losing one’s innocence (that’s what all YA books and movies are about these days) but about soft centers and hard shells - about the cute colliding with the cruel. “Pumpkin, there’s nothing safe anymore.” That’s what calmly downcast Oliver Sullivan (Ron Livingston) tells his teenage daughter, Cassie (Chloë Grace Moretz), partway through the new young-adult dystopian sci-fi The 5th Wave, and it’s a good example of the kind of very thin, deadly line the film tries to walk.
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