Writer(s): Susannah Grant, Akiva Goldsman, and Jeff Pinkner. Based on the novel by Rick Yancey.
Starring: Chloe Grace Moretz, Alex Roe, Zackary Arthur, and Liev Schreiber
Prior to seeing The 5th Wave in a (second-run) theater, I was immediately reminded why I stopped seeing mainstream movies at all in the first place: it’s a joyless walk through derivative landscapes, featuring carbon-copy characters stolen almost verbatim from a million movies before it. It’s a bad movie, but not because of its blandness or its write-by-numbers plot; rather, it’s a bad movie because it blatantly strives for nothing more than mediocrity.
I suppose part of that blame falls on the books, which rely on the ever-popular Twilight formula in which a human falls in love with a non-human, and then must defy the odds to make the relationship work. Only here, the “outsider” of the relationship is not a vampire, but an alien, which is part of a race that are imaginatively referred to as “The Others”. But whereas the books seem to be pushing the envelope of its target demographic (my wife, who has read the two that have been published up until now, says they are much more violent and have more language than the movie does), the film version is content with watering everything down to its lowest-common-denominator roots, in an obvious effort to cater to the teenage crowd.
Cassie Sullivan (played by Chloe Grace Moretz) is your typical high-schooler with a caring, loving, complete, and wholesome family consisting of a father (a completely unnecessary Luke Wilson), a mother (Maggie Siff), and a younger brother named Sam (Zackary Arthur). But things are not as perfect as they seem in this fairytale world: aliens are beginning the most-drawn out invasion in history. As we learn from the long tagline, which also serves as a curiously-concise plot synopsis that almost eliminates the need to even watch the movie in the first place, the first wave is darkness: the aliens, who hover above Earth in large UFOs, use an electromagnetic shield to disable everything, from engines, to cell phones, to electricity. In wave two, they cause massive flooding to all bodies of water on Earth, meaning those that live within a hundred miles of an ocean are all but screwed.
The third wave brings disease, as “The Others” infect birds with a deadly virus that naturally spreads to almost all living things. Some of the people are naturally immune to it, but those that aren’t slowly die an agonizing death: Cassie’s mother is one of them. The fourth wave is an all-out invasion, which we learn after the Army infiltrates a refugee camp in which Cassie, Sam, and their father are staying. Curiously, the children are bussed out to safety, while the parents are told that the one functioning bus will be back shortly to reunite parents with their children. Not surprisingly, this is a lie; through a debriefing to the parents by the required is-he-evil-or-is-he-good character Colonel Vosch (coolly played by Liev Schreiber), the Earth is under attack by aliens who can possess anyone without any trace. In other words, it’s impossible to differentiate the aliens, who look exactly like you or I, from normal humans. Also not surprisingly, Cassie does not make the bus, leaving her brother to make the mysterious trip all by himself, while also giving the story a convenient story arc.
Then there’s the fifth wave, in which the captured children are turned into soldiers to fight the onslaught of aliens, using technologically-advanced headsets that can detect who the aliens are. Would you believe that Cassie’s old high school crush, Ben Parrish, and her brother Sam happen to be in the same squad? Or that Ben takes a liking to Sam (not knowing of his relation to Cassie) and does everything in his power to protect him from a world so violent and cruel?
But Cassie isn’t just twiddling her thumbs during all of this: after witnessing the death of her father at the hands of the military, she grabs a machine-gun and starts off in her quest to find Sam. Not long into her quest, she is shot in the leg while roaming through an abandoned freeway; so great is her blood loss that she lapses into unconsciousness. As we know will happen, she wakes up in a mysterious place, conveniently picked up by an attractive young man with dreamy eyes who attempts to nurse her back to health. He is Evan Walker, and we learn that all of his immediate relatives were wiped out during the previous waves, and he is deadset on helping her to compensate for his failure to save his own family. She is reluctant to accept his help at first, fearing that he may be one of “The Others”, but after he saves her life, she realizes that he might not be so bad to have around after all.
Then, one night, they are attacked while hiding out in a car, and the ease in which Evan dispatches three people, all armed, has Cassie questioning his genetic makeup yet again. Is he a human, as he assured her that he was, or something much, much worse? Forming an uneasy alliance (aren’t they always in these stories?), they set aside their differences in order to infiltrate the military base where Sam, and the other kids, are being forced to fight the alien intruders. But not everything is what it seems, as they will soon find out…
The whole project just feels emotionless and distant, like we are clearly watching actors and crew go through the motions simply to collect a paycheck: everyone does their jobs, but no one is interested in going above and beyond. Even though it’s been years (literally) since I have seen a big-budget “blockbuster”, I see the focus is still on computer effects, which are very much still obviously computer effects; the technology doesn’t seem to have progressed all that much in the many months I’ve been absent from the scene. I am probably in the minority—and probably sounding like a condescending, elitist jerk at the moment—but I just don’t get any satisfaction from hopelessly watching a videogame that I can’t control play out in front of my eyes. So to say that none of this inspired me to do anything but excitedly leave the theater when it was over, should go without saying.
The one saving grace for me was Liev Schreiber’s performance as Vosch, a man who is required to hover between “evil” and “genuine”, something that Shreiber does with complete conviction. He has such an intimidating presence that he gives his character a complexity missing from all the rest; an effortless balance that constantly leaves the viewer guessing what side he’s on, even as it becomes more and more apparent. Schreiber does something that is nearly impossible to do, and that is to almost singlehandedly give an uninspired character an extra dimension; I was absolutely drawn to his performance, and he easily became my favorite anything of the whole movie.
If you are a fan of the big-budget spectacle disguised as a movie, or if you have read the books in this series (as my wife has), then you will probably enjoy this a lot more than I did (and in the interest of full disclosure, my wife really liked it). It’s the kind of movie that allows you to just sit back, shut your mind off, eat some popcorn, and understand everything without having to make much effort to follow along. My biggest qualm is that those qualities have come to define almost every Hollywood blockbuster these days, to the point that audiences seem content with never having to turn their minds back on. But watching movies like The 5th Wave, ones that strictly adhere to time-worn formulas simply to make a buck, is akin to making a copy of a copy of a piece of paper, and then repeating this a million times: it doesn’t take long for the quality to drop until, eventually, all you are left with is a blank sheet of paper.
RECAP: As with the vast number of Hollywood blockbusters, The 5th Wave is long on obviously fake computer-generated effects, but short on anything of actual substance. It’s a cash grab, from the first frame to the last, one that follows a strictly formulaic story from which it never has the desire to stray. It feels emotionless and distant: sure, it has plenty of the obligatory scenes of emotional distress, but they are completely simulated by actors who either lack the talent, or the commitment, to give them any kind of lasting effect. My one plus is Liev Schreiber’s performance as Vosch; he oozes charisma, and strikes his character’s required balance of “evil” and “genuine” with surprising aptitude. Of course, if you like this kind of movie, or are familiar with the source material, then chances are pretty good that you will like this one, as my wife did. Personally, I just can’t get any satisfaction out of watching a movie that I feel like I have seen dozens of times before, completely verbatim.
RATING: 3.5/10
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