Chloë Grace Moretz and Saoirse Ronan are great actors. Moretz is capable of embracing incredible darkness and can still elicit audience’s sympathy in Let Me In, Kick-Ass and 30 Rock. Ronan’s characters may do bad things, but she has a fresh innocence that keeps her character’s spirit separate from her character’s deeds in Byzantium, Violet & Daisy and Atonement. Because Ronan seems like a foreign actress, even though she was born in NY and later moved to Ireland, she gets better roles with more mature themes even from American filmmakers. Moretz is clearly an American and is at risk of getting sucked into an American teen movie vortex and getting the dreaded child actor label with no potential to exercise her incredibly nuanced acting prowess. Ronan gets films like How I Live Now, and Moretz gets The 5th Wave.
The 5th Wave is an alien apocalyptic movie that is fun in the beginning if you like a good apocalypse, but when the story focuses on Moretz’s struggle to reunite with her family without the CGI, it gets deadly dull and trite. Earth girls are easy. Eye roll.
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I really liked the beginning of The 5th Wave. The 5th Wave evoked the dread of Independence Day and V with the omnipresent alien ships and gave me multiple doomsday scenarios. (The 5th Wave is bad enough without alluding to another bad movie, District 9.) The first wave is an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that destroys our technology. The second wave is a tsunami that affects the whole world, which evokes the best parts of The Day After and is as close as The 5th Wave gets to an international perspective of the alien apocalypse. The third wave is an avian flu pandemic, which evokes such amazing movies as Contagion, miniseries like The Stand or British TV series like Survivors, the original and the remake. The fourth wave is anti-climatic. It is just a series of aliens who look like humans and are shooting at any human beings who survived the first four waves. It isn’t even fun in an Invasion of the Body Snatchers vein. They are aliens because they want to kill us, but they are indistinguishable from human beings in the blandest as opposed to sinister ways.
The 5th Wave is supposed to be shocking, but I saw the plot point coming a mile away. First, whenever someone separates children from parents, think evil Nazis, not heroic British. Second, the massacre of the parents was a dead giveaway even though it can be interpreted as unintentional. Third, I love Maria Bello, but she is completely wasted in The 5th Wave. There is no woman in the military who would wear that much makeup while on duty during an alien apocalypse. Clearly she is evil. Fourth, forced inscription of children as soldiers is usually a Third World evil move so while the US military may have flaws, we have not doing that going for us. Fourth, the X-ray thing seemed totally like a trick. Take the thing out after you kill the person, and then I’ll believe you. You’re not John Carpenter, and that was way too easy. Fifth, Live Schreiber has been evil in movies since X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Shame on you if you were surprised.
I hated the Sam plot device. I know that little kids will lose their crap if they don’t have their favorite animal. I know that I did over my red bunny. It is the alien apocalypse. Was it worth it to have her get off the bus to retrieve it? Now you don’t have your sister AND your teddy bear! When he realizes the bus is taking off before his sister can return, instead of running up to the school bus driver and telling him to pull over, Sam just looks out the window. When I was little, and mom left me in the bus for a bathroom break at a pit stop during a long Greyhound bus trip, even if the driver was just moving parking spaces, you know that he got an earful from tiny me. Moretz’s character goes to all that trouble to retrieve the bear, and she loses it and her book bag with all her worldly possessions multiple times throughout The 5th Wave. It is a book bag. Keep it strapped to your back. Neither of you deserve to survive the alien apocalypse. Why are you alive?
The spiritual aspect of The 5th Wave feels superficial. Moretz’s first victim wears a cross. There is the 1 Corinthians 13:11 quote. The allusions are there, but they don’t evoke deeper themes because The 5th Wave does not really have any. The 5th Wave is miles away from the textured The Hunger Games trilogy and Ender’s Game.
The 5th Wave leaves us with potentially not one, but TWO love triangles: Cassie, Ben and Evan and Ben, Cassie and Ringer, who Maika Monroe plays. What is the deal with love triangles in teen dramas?
If The 5th Wave is ever good after the strong opening scenes, it is because of Monroe, who is the dark horse in this race, which was initially between Moretz and Ronan. Monroe was amazing in The Guest and It Follows, and she is the only redeeming factor in The 5th Wave. The 5th Wave underutilizes her, but she steals the show and gets the best moments. The 5th Wave painfully contrasts Monroe, who is blond, to Moretz’s character. Moretz is a typical, blond, emotional teen, but Ringer is dark-haired, strong and independent. Unfortunately I found out AFTER watching The 5th Wave that Ringer was supposed to be an Asian teenager. Come on!
An imdb commenter perfectly mocked The 5th Wave by calling it The 5th Lame. Come for the apocalypse, leave for the coming of age romance. Only Terminator can pull that crap and get away with it. The 5th Wave is completely disappointing.