After the buildings crumble, after the populace has been decimated, after the world itself has ended, all that shall remain will be teens. Teens, and their hormones.
Adolescent infatuations practically outlast the cockroaches in The 5th Wave, the latest instantly forgettable YA-lit adaptation pandering to the cultural tastemakers that turned The Maze Runner and Divergent series into hot commodities. The threat of total annihilation raining from the sky does little to put a damper on the rumblings in survivor Cassie Sullivan’s (Chloe Grace Moretz, one of exactly five actors too good for this movie) loins; if anything, the alien invasion she spends the film fleeing turns out to be a real mood-setter for her and her almost comically hunky companion Evan (Alex Roe). As everything they know and love turns to dust, they engage in a courtship so overstated and hackneyed that it eventually converts this banal hybrid of romance and sci-fi into an unintentional comedy. Nicholas Sparks was born too late to have originated the core concept for War of the Worlds, but now modern audiences can get a pretty solid idea of how things might’ve played out otherwise. Even with certain doom lurking around every corner, this film can still find plenty of time to leer at a heartthrob’s rippling torso as he washes himself in a river.
Cassie and Evan are but two thirds of the Twi-lite love triangle this film throws together between visually flat action sequences. The last piece of the equation is Ben (Nick Robinson, most recently seen being too cool for dinosaurs in Jurassic World), Cassie’s pre-invasion high school crush. She spends the first act all heart-eyes-cat-emoji for him despite the fact that he may secretly be a loaf of white bread, but the mysterious appearance of extraterrestrial visitors capable of assuming human form directs her attentions elsewhere. After watching both of her parents die and getting separated from her cutesy kid brother Sammy (Zackary Arthur), she vows to reunite with him by trekking the 60 miles to the Air Force base where he’s taken shelter. Complicating this journey are the bullet wound Cassie sustains after a day in the lawless wilderness and Evan, who tends to her wounds like a totally-cut male nurse straight out of a 12-year-old’s dream journal. With the sort of looks that moms will inevitably describe as “yummy,” he certainly cuts a commanding figure, but Cassie’s still hesitant to accept him — he could be one of them. As they grow more comfortable with one another, they start to locate something even more special than trust. Could it be love? Or is it just the childlike facsimile thereof, the figment of an underdeveloped imagination that sees things like reading someone else’s diary as romantic gestures? There are a few insultingly obvious late-stage twists I’d love to reveal here, but for now I’ll content myself with the spoiler that it’s definitely that second one.
Meanwhile, the Air Force base housing li’l Sammy doubles as the training facility for an elite squad of pubescent resistance fighters under the tutelage of a conspicuously sinister military man (Liev Schreiber). This is where a lot of the incredulous-snort-inducing silliness goes down, from a brief flirtation with actually having an idea — The alien invaders colonizing Earth aren’t so different from Americans spreading their imperialist influence across the globe! Wake up, sheeple! — to the wonderful Maika Monroe as Ringer, a faux-edgy young woman who wears a lot of eye makeup despite Hot Topic having ostensibly gone out of business shortly following the apocalypse. In these passages, director J Blakeson banks on the audience remaining dim and complacent, assuming that they’d never once wonder why the Army types are acting so unusually villainous, or why they’re the only ones who still have access to electricity after an electro-magnetic pulse plunges Earth into darkness. Judging from the sloppiness of their plan of attack, it seems that the aliens behind waves one through four have just as low an estimation of human intelligence as the folks behind The 5th Wave.
Blakeson’s film does a lot of the assorted little things bad movies do, like blatantly hawk its parent company’s products (though who would be compelled to buy a Sony phone after seeing they don’t even work during end-of-days alien invasion scenarios?), shamelessly cue up its own sequel, and drop lines like “love is what makes us human,” but the real problem is the risible romance that only blossoms during moments when more important things are happening. There are plenty of places perfectly suited for confessions of love — a candlelit dinner, for example, or perhaps a shoreline stroll. “In the middle of running away from heavily armed alien enemies” is not one of them.
