Please stop making apocalypse movies.
The world will not end if there are no more apocalypse movies and The 5th Wave is proof of that. I had very low expectations before watching this film and sadly they were not proved wrong. Director J Blackeson’s adaptation of Rick Yancy’s bestselling novel The 5th Wave does not do Yancy justice. Many key parts from the book are left out of the movie, impairing the flow drastically.
The movie feels rushed in the beginning because there is barely any buildup. There are five waves of attacks but the first four only take up the first 30 minutes of the film. The pace is so rushed that important events are not given the attention they require or deserve. The film focused on a few different characters, jumping back and forth from one separate story line to the other, which upset the flow of the movie.
The acting is a whole other story. The actors try to make the best of what depth they are given about their characters, but they struggled since there was barely any depth to begin with. Chloe Grace Moretz stars as Cassie, the protagonist of the film alongside Nick Robinson, who plays Ben Parish. The two of them are fighting the “others,” which are the aliens that have invaded Earth; their arrival ushers in the establishment of a dystopian military regime. However, Ben and Cassie’s storylines do not cross again until the last half hour of the movie, which I felt contributed to the lack of coherency in the movie. The acting by veterans Ron Livingston and Liev Schreiber is one of the strongest portions of this movie; without their acting skills and depth, it would have been a lot worse than it already was.
There are two more books in this series, but since I am unfamiliar with the novels, I was confused by the film’s ending, which was very abrupt and left me with many unanswered questions. Now that I know there will be two more movies, I understand why they had a cliffhanger ending, but I still found it unsatisfactory.
These days, apocalyptic movies are so common that if you’re going to make one, you need to have some element of originality so the film doesn’t feel so predictable. Unfortunately, there’s nothing original or fresh about The 5th Wave. Definitely a movie you can skip.
Written by: CaraJoy Kleinrock – arts@theaggie.org
