Rating: 0.5 stars
Before I watched “The Fifth Wave,” I predicted that it would involve a young, pretty girl who somehow diverges from the rest of the youth population to save the world and becomes the subject of a “two hot guys” love triangle.
Surprisingly, everything that I predicted about the movie was true.
“The Fifth Wave” centers around an ordinary high school girl named Cassie Sullivan (Chloe Grace Moretz), whose planet gets invaded by an alien species named the Others. Because the Others cannot be distinguished from humans, a secret Other army led by Colonel Vosch (Liev Schreiber) manages to manipulate a camp of teenagers and children into killing anyone who contacted a green virus (which is only a faulty illusion created by the Others in an attempt to rid the Earth of all humans).
Although everything about “The Fifth Wave” was cheesy and cliche, perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the movie was the lack of a single likeable character. There was no distinction between any of the main characters’ personalities, and the few attempts to give them depth (such as killing off both of Cassie’s parents) were unconvincing and uncreative. In fact, Moretz’s expression when she discovered her dead father’s body following a reckless shoot-out and when she unexpectedly bumped into her high school crush, Ben Parish (Nick Robinson), were identical. Since everything from “The Fifth Wave” had already been done by countless other teenage action movies, I don’t understand why the movie was even made.
If you’re a dedicated fan of teen science fiction thriller movies, you’re the only person I would recommend this movie to, because I pretty much mentioned everything that it was about. In other words, “The Fifth Wave” was just a plot line that Columbia Pictures managed to get good-looking actors and mainstream teenage music to put into motion. Even so, the only thing the plot line was useful for was putting an insomniac to sleep, which a $5 ZzzQuil could do just fine and cheaper.
