‘The 5th Wave’ review: Not worth the repetition

MANILA, Philippines – J Blakeson’s The 5th Wave is one pathetic bore.

It is The Hunger Games without the costumes and the histrionics. It is Twilight without the put-on and therefore campy angst. It is Divergent without the attempt at a decent allegory. It is Maze Runner without the sometimes exciting action.

All of its predecessors aren’t exactly great entertainment. That is probably the reason why the film lacks any semblance of ambition. It dully limps towards its unsurprising conclusion, which is essentially a foreshadowing of a barrage of hopeless sequels that only repeat the garish slogan of almost all films of this type – never trust authority.

Scraping the bottom

That it scrapes the utmost bottom of the barrel of a drained genre reflects the desperation of its makers – to turn a quick buck out of another one of those novels that can’t get past the youth’s thirst for independence against authority as their thematic core.

 

It is everything that is wrong with the Hollywood machine. It is unimaginative, relying mostly on an equally unimaginative source that curiously amassed fans along the way. It is peppered with scenes that exploit grandiose special effects, gravely emphasizing how the rest of the film is brazenly dull and unspectacular.

It is confused with its existence. It cannot decide whether it wants to be a film that can survive on its own or a set-up for a franchise that will predictably fail towards the end like most of the franchises that went before it.

The set-up

Cassie (Chloe Grace Moretz) describes herself as a normal teenager. She goes to school by day. She parties responsibly, always making sure that she gets home right before her curfew. She has a cute family, with a little brother (Zackary Arthur) whom she spoils with nightly lullabies and teddy bears. Everything is perfectly normal until the aliens arrive to invade the Earth in waves of catastrophes.

We all know this because Cassie narrates it with surprising clarity. After killing an injured man out of paranoia, she is ridden with philosophical musings as to how the alien invasion has resulted in her loss of humanity. See, The 5th Wave’s conceit is that the aliens take the form of other humans by inhabiting them like parasites. This puts everyone in a state of paranoia, with people killing other people.

Basically, the military recruits all of the kids to battle the invasion. Cassie, however, misses the bus and gets separated from her brother. The film is all about her traveling several miles across lackluster forests to get to the military camp where her little brother is being trained to kill aliens dressed up as humans.

Along the way, she meets up with mysterious Evan Walker (Alex Roe), who forms the final piece in her love triangle-to-be with Ben Parish (Nick Robinson), her crush from her normal days and who is now a squadron leader for the military. 

Tedious adventuring 

The 5th Wave is a tedious crawl. Moretz plays her character with tenuous conviction. She is uncomfortably stale in the action scenes and laughably awkward during the romantic interludes. She is only decent when she is contemplating on the shallow philosophies of her miserable lot, the scenes of which are very few and truncated.

Of course, this is mostly the fault of Blakeson and writers Susannah Grant, Akiva Goldsman, and Jeff Pinkner, whose adaptation of Rick Yancey’s text is stunted in terms of characterization and emotional heft. Case in point is the film’s domineering authority figure, Colonel Vosch (Liev Schreiber), who is depicted in the film with as much personality as an abandoned action figure.

The 5th Wave is an adventure whose beginning is somewhat intriguing, whose middle is a struggle, and whose end is cheap and frustrating. It this is just the start to a franchise that seeks to prolong the public’s infatuation with pseudo-smart dystopian myths about kids saving the world, let us hope that it gets better. It should be easy. There is no way but up with a film as close to torture as this. – Rappler.com

Francis Joseph Cruz litigates for a living and writes about cinema for fun. The first Filipino movie he saw in the theaters was Carlo J. Caparas’ Tirad Pass. Since then, he’s been on a mission to find better memories with Philippine cinema. Profile photo by Fatcat Studios