Does anyone remember when books for young adults were, you know, fun?
Rick Yancey’s YA novel The 5th Wave (the first in a trilogy, God help us) continues the current YA obsession with destruction and dystopia, though by grounding his work in the pressing terrorism and climate-based fears of the modern world, Yancey’s novel did have a particular spark of urgency designed to appeal to American audiences.
The world is under siege by an alien force that remains unseen and uses the Earth’s own resources to destroy it. After electricity and technology are decimated and natural disasters and disease cull the Earth’s population, the extra-terrestrials then invade, using human beings as hosts.
When spunky-female-protagonist-by-numbers Cassie (Chloe Moretz) is separated from her younger brother, she joins forces with the mysterious rebel Evan (Alex Roe) to find him, while her high school crush Ben (Nick Robinson, Jurassic Park) leads an army of teen commandos, apparently being trained to combat the Others. As aliens invade, so do hormones, and we discover that maybe the greatest force of all healing and destruction is…love?
Or something. Director J Blakeson’s (The Descent 2) painfully derivative directing wastes the potential of the premise by focusing on the blandly written teen love triangle, which is rendered all the more limp by the two leading (young) men’s damp performances. The first act, which sees Moretz steel herself against the apocalyptic onslaught is vaguely compelling, but she’s soon reduced to being repeatedly saved by charisma-free males – though not from the plodding nature of the suspense-free plot, or the awful CGI of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them action scenes.
If a technological blackout does occur, losing this impotent and formulaic effort would be a saving grace.