“When you’re in high school, every day feels like the end of the world,” says Cassie Sullivan, the heroine of “The 5th Wave.” And when your Essa, being forced to sit through the 5th Wave, ever moment feels like an infinity. Let’s get started on this latest YA hit to be made into a movie.
So the 5th Wave focuses on a plucky, determined heroine, who isn’t Katniss Everdeen, but is damn near indistinguishable from Katniss Everdeen…with the exception of being blond. Her species has been decimated by aliens, sending humanity back to the stone age and Cassie Sullivan on the run. She fights through power outages, disease and earthquakes as she struggles to survive.
Know what I always wonder during apocalypse movies? Why? Like, why bother trying to survive? What the hell is the point? So you can spend the next twenty years wandering a barren landscape, in the dark, with no indoor plumbing, before you’re inevitably killed by zombies, aliens or some kind of super-flu? You know my plans for the apocalypse? Suicide. Quick, easy and relatively painless.
But I digress. I was supposed to be talking about this movie. Which I have to admit, is well made. It certainly has a standout star in Chloe Grace Moretz. She’s a compelling intriguing character that’s a bit less prissy than Katniss anyway, so I like that.
The effects are well done, the visuals stunning and it’s a tense, gripping action flick. The direction of J Blakeson shouldn’t be underestimated and I imagine with a better plot, this movie would have been amazing.
But unfortunately, the predetermined, to be expected formula just doesn’t feel new or fresh anymore. When Hunger Games came out, a plucky teenage heroine in an action movie was a treat. Now, it’s a bit tired and a bit overdone. You can see everything coming. Literally every single plot point, from the inevitable love triangle, to the girl coming into her own strength and power, is completely recycled to the point where it’s almost fatiguing.
Also, as a side note there is a tsunami part of the movie that really should have been relocated. Honestly, 5000 people died in Thailand during the 2004 Tsunami. Using that for movie fodder just feels gross.
That, coupled with the poor plot, really didn’t help this movie stand out from anything else offered out there. It’s not lighting up the box office either, having made just $10 million on its opening weekend. While some of that might be due to the winter storm that crippled the East, it has to be said that it just wasn’t that great. It certainly wasn’t terrible and if it had been released ten years ago, it may have been a blockbuster.
But it comes on the heels of the end of a trend. America is all ‘teen girl hero-ed’ out by now and there’s no way to cram another one down, not with the same ridiculous results that The Hunger Games, or even Insurgent, got. As a result, I can’t give this a worth the watch.
WE GAVE IT: 2.5 Stars
