Rick Yancey’s YA novel The Fifth Wave leaps to the silver screen and manages to avoid many dystopian clichés that the genre has drowned in for some time, but also falls into one that we hope it will be watered down should the film earn the sequels based on the beloved second and third books, The Infinite Sea and The Last Star.
Chloe Grace Moretz stars as a pretty normal American teenager whose life quickly becomes anything but. She’s in the latter half of high school when “The Others” arrive, alien spaceships whose inhabitants are never shown, but their wrath is clearly felt. Their form of attack comes in waves – from killing the world’s power to rising seas. These attacks kill hundreds of millions. But the worst of it is when they unleash a strand of the avian flu that practically wipes out the globe. Then… The Fifth Wave starts and it is at that point that things get really confusing and chilling.
There are two elements that makes The Fifth Wave unique.
For a good portion of the film, the YA elements feel fresh. This is a young person who is viewing the most out-of-this-world events any of us could imagine and her take on it is uniquely that of a teenager. Her feelings are something we all can identify with, we’ve all felt them. Yet, none of us went through that teenage angst while trying to stay alive as our planet is being invaded by beings that we have never seen, don’t know what they look like and most terrifying of all, we don’t have any idea what there endgame is.
Whether horror, murder mystery or like The Fifth Wave, an alien invasion film, the terror is much more amplified if the filmmakers allow the audience to mentally drawn their own conclusions. The unknown is ten times more horrifying than anything that can be illustrated with CG and sound effects. Watching Moretz try to protect her little brother and simultaneously make sense of all this madness is emotionally amplified by the fact that the subconscious of the viewer is always wondering when the ground attack, the so-called Fifth Wave, is going to begin and what form it will take.
The Fifth Wave works its best when it is an alien invasion movie with YA overtones. Unfortunately and becomes less compelling when it drifts into that YA cliché of the angst-ridden love triangle. There’s a romance that becomes complicated by the presence of a third party (that we won’t spoil) and possibly a fourth person that could make this a love quadrangle. Sure, people can find love amongst chaos, but we just didn’t believe that with so much death and destruction, that two souls would even be thinking about amore. Yeah, it’s in the book, but it’s a complete and utter distraction to the matter at hand — you’re planet is on the verge of utter destruction and the human race is about to be wiped out!
Will The Fifth Wave get to make those second and third movies? It’s hard to say. YA novels turned films have a varied history of success. Although there is nothing on the landscape right now in cinemas that speak to the YA market, we’re not sure The Fifth Wave will be exactly what they’re looking for. It’s entertaining. It’s thrilling at points and The Movie Mensch does enjoy a good alien invasion movie. We just it had kept to the aliens invading.
Grade: B-