The 5th Wave: Aliens Invaders versus an Army of Twee

The 5th Wave opens with assault rifle-toting teen Cassie Sullivan (Chloë Grace Moretz) ransacking an abandoned convenience store. When she chances upon a wounded man, the pair have a paranoid standoff that ends in bloodshed. The film then rewinds as Cassie narrates the story of how the world came to such a state. The appearance of a colossal spacecraft over Earth preceded four successive waves of destruction: an electromagnetic pulse, a tsunami barrage, a bioengineered epidemic, and the infiltration of the populace by parasitic aliens. This leaves Cassie traveling the Ohio wilds on foot searching for her only remaining family, little brother Sam (Zackary Arthur), who along with the other surviving children has been whisked away by the U.S. Army.

With the adult population decimated, the humorless Colonel Vosch (Liev Schreiber) begins training the remaining children into a force of pint-sized soldiers to hunt down the parasitized humans who have been turned. Sam’s unit includes the taciturn former football jock and Cassie crush Ben (Nick Robinson), who provides the film with a viewpoint from within the kiddie commando squad. Ben’s tale eventually converges with that of Cassie, but only she crosses paths with a mysterious, chiseled farm boy (Alex Roe).

Adapted from the acclaimed young adult novel by Rick Yancey, this cinematic version of the The 5th Wave is a patchwork quilt of science-fiction and dystopian clichés. It swipes imagery and conceits from a plethora of sources but the resulting mush-headed gestalt is hopelessly uninteresting. Although characterized by structural awkwardness and hokey dialog, the film is more inoffensive than actively awful until the third act, when the implausibilities and laughable plot swerves begin to pile up like colliding train cars. Only the redoubtable Schreiber—his natural gravitas miraculously salvaging terrible lines—emerges unscathed from this apocalyptic mess.

The 5th Wave opens Friday, January 22 in wide release.