Checked out The 5th Wave, the new alien invasion YA movie starring Chloe Grace Moretz as a teenage survivor of an alien attack that has wiped out a lot of humanity and her struggle to survive and (sigh) ultimately figure out a love triangle. Maybe that’s being a bit uncharitable – the love triangle only pops up in the last ten minutes of the movie, before that, she has to survive falling in love with one guy and his abs while he’s bathing in a river. OK, fine, that’s a little uncharitable too but the movie really works hard at being a decent sci-fi adventure film while tossing in all the YA cliches to cover its bases.
This is an aggressively average movie that tries but ultimately fails on a script level. It’s written and filmed as if we have never seen an alien invasion/body snatcher movie before so it spends too much time on a Secret Reveal that pretty sure the only people who were surprised about were the dummies in the movie who took WAY too long to figure it out. I mean, aggressively long as though they had never seen alien invasion/body snatcher movie before. And, hey, maybe the target demo for this movie would find this crap original and exciting. You? Me? We already figured this out an hour ago.
Oh, and for my Ohio friends, the book this was based on took place in and around Cincinnati but the author got the geography all messed up. The main character is supposed to be moving north along I75 through Cincinnati and heading for Wright Pat Air Force Base. But none of the descriptions and locations and directions made sense. So the movie has her traveling SW towards Wright Pat and the geography made more sense (not a huge amount of dense forest between Cinci and Dayton, after all). Only problem then was that everyone in the movie called it Wright Patterson Air Force Base and I’m not native to the Cinci/Dayton area, but it’s pretty much just “Wright Pat” as far as anyone around her calls it.
Anyhoo, it was probably filmed in California but whatever.
So, yes, this is a YA teen girl alien invasion movie with a lot of the cliches of the genre. It does have moments of interesting tension and humanity but it also has too much dumb script and false surprises. Oh, and a setup for the inevitable sequel.
Score: 72