The 5th Wave

How many of these young adult fiction books are there? Over the past few years we've had a plethora of books made into movies like The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Divergent and Twilight along with their sequels. As long as they make money at the box office, Hollywood shall continue to make them. Another adaptation in the long line of young adult fiction is The 5th Wave which starts off promisingly but then becomes another generic teenage film with a romance subplot and unconvincing action scenes.

Cassie Sullivan (Chloe Grace Moretz) is just a normal teenage girl living happily in Ohio with her father (Ron Livingston), mother (Maggie Siff) and brother, Sam (Zackary Arthur). Their lives change when aliens invade Earth. The aliens inflict wave after wave of attack: the 1st wave refers to electromagnetic pulses being disabled resulting in a loss of communication and transportation; the 2nd wave is a flurry of natural disasters; the 3rd wave is an airborne deadly virus transmitted by birds; the 4th wave is the alien species inhabiting humans like parasites; the 5th wave is alien domination. The adults are separated from the children and the US army led by Colonel Vosch (Liev Schreiber) is taking control of the situation, placing children in quarantine so they can assist in fighting the alien species. Cassie finds herself isolated from her peers and must fight her own battles.

The plot is tense and exciting but that's just for the first half an hour. Once the children have been separated from the adults, things become a bit stale. It doesn't help when there's sizable plot holes throughout the movie. The story then drifts off into a romantic subplot which was just as boring as the Twilight series. When the children are trained to fight the aliens, there's a sense that all excitement has dissipated. If the focus was on Cassie fighting her own battles and trying to find her brother then it would have made for a more exciting movie.

The director is J Blakeson and this is his second directorial effort after The Disappearance of Alice Creed in 2009. It might be another seven years until he is employed again for he has some learning to do. Some of those close-up shots of the actors with their foreheads not in the frame were annoying and several of the fight scenes were difficult to see as they were filmed in natural lighting at night!

Chloe Grace Moretz is developing into a terrific actress if she hasn't reached that level already. She is convincing as the teenager who must make her own decisions when her family is no longer around to support her. The two actors who play her love interests, Nick Robinson and Alex Roe, are both devilishly handsome but their roles could be played by any young, unknown Hollywood heartthrob. Liev Schreiber adds integrity to the production and can always be relied upon to hold the fort in the acting stakes.

There are quite a few clever ideas in this film but the execution could have been much better. If you're a fan of young adult fiction, you won't be too disappointed but for people who have seen many movies, there's nothing new which will cause you to leap for joy. The story sticks pretty much to the generic formula and doesn't reach any great heights. http://mlaimlai2.wix.com/magical-movie-review

For the first time i am writing a review for a movie. If you are not under 15 years old you should stay away from this movie because its just a really bad movie with some visual effects. The movie was looking good at first 10 minutes but after that everything in the movie started to seems stupid. Ending scene was the worst part of it. Scenario and most of the scenes in the movie is just disaster.

Rating it a 7 because it totally kept my attention. However, this could have been a 9. The first 30 minutes are really good. They really should have kept down that serious adult track. Unfortunately it became a teen movie. It's like running a marathon and gassing out after mile 8. They should have kept it adult level, but rather it got a little cheesy making it a kid-level PG-ish feel. All that being said, there was still enough to keep my attention to finish up and I didn't regret my 2-hour investment.

The 5th Wave is based on the book of the same name and it's main focus is on a girl reconnecting with her brother. It's a tried and true story for the post-apocalyptic genre and doesn't do anything really cool with it except for the title. The title of the film plays into the "twist" in the film, if you can even call it that and it's about the only thing that it does a little differently.

Nothing too bad on the acting side. There's no Oscar winning performances but everybody does a decent job with the crap dialogue they are given. Except the kid... He just stares all the time, looking dumbfounded. Must have been a way to keep people from calling him "The annoying kid."

The film looks good in it's presentation. The choreography in the fight scenes is a bit exaggerated but I enjoyed that. What is does so wrong is the absolute straight 'teen angst novel' scenes and relationships. The books suffered from this too and I feel it could have been made to be a bit more serious to kind of adult up the series and make it fit with a wider audience.

Overall it is a bad adaption of an average book. It alienates everyone over the age of 12 by making it way too much like the novel and not trying to change up some of the things it needed to.

As a low-budget sci-fi flick, The Fifth Wave starts quite promisingly with a more logical continuation from the opening scenes of "Independence Day". The end of the world is nigh. An alien spacecraft has put itself into a threatening earth orbit (note: actually 'orbiting' - as a nod to science guys like me - rather than just inexplicably hanging there in the sky, as Douglas Adams once put it, "in much the same way that bricks don't").

The aliens are throwing calamity after calamity down at small-town America in 'waves': earthquakes; tidal surges; modified bird flu; and bombings.

Against this stressful backdrop, the ever-reliable Chloe Grace-Moretz ("Kick Ass"; "Let the Right One In") plays Cassie who after getting separated from her younger brother Sam (Zackery Arthur) faces the dangers of a cross-country Alabama trek to rescue him.

Like I said, quite a promising premise, and it flows quite nicely until the family get to a Fort Wilderness style sanctuary in the forest. There however the plot goes awry, with the aliens making a seemingly ridiculous strategic move.

Jaw-dropping dumbness now follows with a 'see-it-coming-from-a-mile-away' plot-twist casting Cassie onto her solo-mission, and the film declines into a rather poor 'Hunger-maze-giance' wannabe with Cassie torn between the affections of old crush Ben (Nick "Jurassic World" Robinson) and mysterious saviour Evan (Alex Roe). Much muscle-rippling and skinny-dipping ensues as Cassie oohs and aahs in a girlie fashion that erodes her kick-ass (no pun intended) characterization to date.

The director is J Blakeson.... no, me neither. This is only his second feature, and is a big ask.

The film rather obviously cues up a sequel: this is the first of a series of – apparently quite good – books by Rick Yancey, with the next in the series being called "The Infinite Sea". I don't think I will be rushing to the cinema to see the sequel, if it does happen.

A disappointing film that starts with real promise but then loses its way. Grace-Moretz really does deserve better. Nice animated Gif poster though!.

(Please visit http://bob-the-movie-man.com for the graphical version of this review, and to comment with your thoughts. Thanks).