The 5th Wave," from the get-go, has difficulty
establishing tone and mood. Teenager Cassie Sullivan (Chloë Grace Moretz),
clutching an automatic weapon, has a standoff in an abandoned mini mart with a
wounded soldier begging for his life.
Close-ups of Moretz's terrified face
predominate throughout. Cassie's voiceover then kicks in, informing us that
before all this, she was a "normal" teenage girl. Those words are a
betrayal of the character Rick Yancey created in his popular YA series. There's
nothing "normal" about Cassie in the book, but onscreen, Moretz
hasn't been given a character she can sink her teeth into. Cassie onscreen
never comes to life, and without Cassie, the film doesn't come to life either.
Even the most primal scenes (mass executions, family reunions, goodbyes), are
ho-hum.
Cassie lives with her parents (Ron Livingston and Maggie
Siff) and her little brother Sam (Zackary Arthur). Her "normal" life
disappears when a mysterious object appears in the sky over earth. Then come
the different "waves" of attack from the aliens referred to as
"The Others." The first wave is an electromagnetic pulse that kills
the power across the globe. Airplanes fall from the sky. The second wave is a
series of tsunamis that wipe out coastal areas. The third wave is a plague that
kills millions more. The fourth wave involves snipers who stalk and kill the
survivors of the other waves. And the fifth wave, unknown, is imminent.
Cassie's mother dies in the plague. The rest of the family
trek to a makeshift refugee camp in the woods (where everyone is armed to the
teeth). One day, Army tanks show up (the military is immune to the power
outage, a fact never explained), and the intimidating Colonel Vosch (Liev
Schreiber) carts the children off in school busses to an undisclosed location,
promising the panicked adults that they will soon follow. Vosch, at first a
savior who takes charge, has more up his sleeve, and Cassie is left to flee
through the woods, clutching her little brother's beloved teddy bear.
The narrative splits between Cassie's journey and the
journey of her high school crush Ben Parish (Nick Robinson, believable as a boy
who has been completely traumatized). Cassie, determined to find her brother,
camps in the woods, is shot in the leg by a sniper, and then rescued by a
farm-boy named Evan Walker (Alex Roe). Evan is caring but mysterious. He also
has blazing baby-blues and rock-hard abs. What would have happened if Cassie
had been rescued by a guy who looked like Wilford Brimley? (In the book, the
Evan Walker section is extremely strange and suspenseful. Here, it takes on an
embarrassing "Blue Lagoon"-ish quality - especially when she peeks
longingly at his sculpted torso while he bathes in a river.)
Ben Parish is taken off with the other kids to an Air Force
Base, and put through military boot-camp for the upcoming fight against The
Others. The trash-talking kid-soldiers play poker in their barracks, go through
weapons training, all under the watchful eye of Colonel Vosch's hard-assed
medical assistant (Maria Bello). The kid-soldier episodes have an inadvertent
absurdity to them, especially when Ben, squad leader, yells at one of his
comrades while taking enemy fire: "Stay low!" (The child can't help
but "stay low". The child is only three feet tall. His rifle is
taller than he is.) A new member of Ben's squad, a deadpan teenage girl
nick-named Ringer (Maika Monroe, in a fun performance), challenges his
authority, but is an asset in battle. She can shoot a moving target.
The strengths of director J. Blakeson and production
designer Jon Billington lie in the apocalyptic wasteland scenes: a highway
filled with crashed cars, corpses piled up, orange fires raging through a dark
landscape. The colors are sometimes too bright for such a grim story, and the
shattering of group trauma isn't present (the way it is in the opening scenes
of "The Hunger Games"). Cassie's determination to find her brother is
sentimentalized (so many closeups of that teddy bear). In the book Cassie is
ravaged by grief and rage. Here, she just seems slightly put-out and sometimes
super-scared. Moretz is an excellent actress but she is unable to give Cassie
the depth that "The 5th Wave" needs. (Her hair also remains freshly
shampooed throughout, even while squatting in the woods for, apparently, weeks
on end. Details matter.) "The 5th Wave" is Dystopia-Lite.
When a book is adapted for the screen, there are reasons why
some tangential plot points need to go. But Susannah Grant, Akiva Goldsman, and
Jeff Pinkner, the screenwriting team who adapted Yancey's book, have destroyed
the book's rich texture. Maybe it's unfair to judge a movie adaptation on the
source material, but when problems arise in such situations, it's often a
problem of adaptation. Even worse, it may make audiences think the book is as
silly as the movie.
Post-apocalyptic stories tap into a need to imagine our own
destruction, a need pricked with anxiety-filled questions: "What would I
do in this situation? How would I fare?" Literature abounds with such
stories. Shelley's "Ozymandias" depicts a statue of an ancient king
crumbling in the desert sand. T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men," with its
images of broken columns and fading stars, and its famous final lines,
"This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper,"
expresses post-WWI European desolation. Authors Aldous Huxley and George
Orwell, Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale," Cormac McCarthy's
"The Road," Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep?", Stephen King's "The Mist," H.G. Wells' "The War of
the Worlds," 1950s sci-fi movies, comic books, all laid the groundwork for
the Dystopian Literary Craze in which we now live. Lois Lowry's 1993 "The
Giver," aimed at a YA audience, ushered in a new era of Dystopian books
for teenagers. Suzanne Collins' successful "Hunger Games" franchise
has spawned a million imitators. If "Anne of Green Gables" were to be
published today, the plucky red-headed orphan would have to crawl through an
industrial wasteland to get any attention. Rick Yancey's trilogy (the final installment
scheduled for May 2016) is filled with haunting imagery of the earth left more
than half-empty, but most chillingly, he understands tyranny and how it
operates: if you can make confused frightened people line up and march towards
the exits in an orderly fashion, you're halfway towards owning them completely.
These important elements are sketched-in and undeveloped in
the film. Instead, we're left with Cassie and Evan throwing longing looks at
one another, confusing monologues where people figure out what the "5th
wave" is, and reunion scenes that have no punch. The closing narration is
milquetoast cliche, something the Cassie in the book, with her raw tenderized
heart, would never have tolerated.
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