The 5th Wave
Director: J Blakeson
Stars: Chloë Grace Moretz, Matthew Zuk, Gabriela Lopez
Duration: 118 mins
Class: 12
KRS Film Releasing Ltd

The Oxford dictionary describes ‘dystopia’ as an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one. The opposite of utopia.

For all its bleakness, the dystopian setting is one often favoured by many authors, especially of young adult literary fiction. It’s a genre whose popularity has no doubt been augmented by the recent spate of film adaptations of some of its best-selling titles – the Divergent series, for example or the Maze Runner pentalogy, with the third instalments of each expected the reach the big screen over the next year.

Towering over them all, of course, is The Hunger Games, the four-part movie adaptation of the three-part book series headlined by Jennifer Lawrence. It has been, thus far, the most successful of recent Young Adult adaptations and has set the bar very high, a point which its followers have failed to reach. And this week’s release, The 5th Wave, similarly falls quite far off the mark.

Gives neither the story nor its protagonists the chance to develop into something engaging

The story kicks off with our young heroine Cassie Sullivan (Chloë Grace Moretz), as she checks out an abandoned convenience store, rifle in hand, terror in heart when she discovers an injured man and can’t decide whether he is friend or foe.

She takes the decision – but is soon proved wrong. We flash back to what she herself describes as the last normal day in her life, the day before a huge spaceship appears in the sky, hovering unnervingly over Earth for ages… until it unleashes wave after wave of destruction.

The first wave is a global power outage destroying all technology at its core; the second sends devastating earthquakes and floods; the third a fatal virus that kills those millions not already dead following waves one and two. The fourth is the invasion itself, as the aliens, known as the ‘Others’ land on the planet. They leave the population of the world utterly decimated, and the few survivors prepare for the absolute worst as the stage is set for the fifth wave… while Cassie is separated from her younger brother and desperately tries to reunite with him.

Up until this point, the film seems promising. Apart from some striking effects – the scenes of the utter carnage caused by the myriad waves of attack are truly quite impressive – there is the sense we are about the witness a solid illustration of the relative utopia of life as we know it as it abruptly turns in a dark and disturbing dystopia. This is unlike many of the storylines we have seen in the genre, which throw us straight into an oppressive world. After all, we can relate to things like earthquakes, viruses, power outages and so forth – things we either experience ourselves or see on the news.

The tension does slowly begin to build up, as Cassie’s life slowly crashes around her she and those who survived with her are forced to learn how to live with the frightening reality that now surrounds them.

And yet, once the story proper kicks in, The 5th Wave adheres very strongly to the formula; quite tediously so. Its lead is a strong female character (Moretz, who deserves much better than what the material offers her) who has huge responsibilities thrust on her as she searches for her younger brother in a bleak, black world.

There’s a love triangle with no spark (featuring Nick Robinson is the moody, broody ex-classmate Cassie has a crush on and Alex Roe as the ridiculously good-looking stranger who rescues her); people in authority who may have a hidden agenda, as represented by army colonel Vosch played Live Schreiber and Maria Bello’s heavily made-up and tough-as-nails Sergeant Reznik; and children sent out to fight the battles that should be fought by the adults… you get the drift.

The script by Susannah Grant, Akiva Goldsman and Jeff Pinkner based on the eponymous novel by Rick Yancey gives neither the story nor its protagonists the chance to develop into something engaging. The Hunger Games struck such a chord, in part, thanks to its richly-drawn characters and complex and intelligent narrative, which drew the viewer in from the start.

The 5th Wave gets nowhere near that depth, offering little tension and a plot built on the thinnest of premises – and why the aliens, who clearly have the capacity to do so, don’t just destroy the planet completely in one attack and get it over with is never truly explained. This is just one of the many questions left unanswered for the sequel… if it ever gets made.