The 5th Wave arrived in January 2016 with a tagline that doubles as a thesis: “Protect your own.” It is a survival story about a 16-year-old named Cassie Sullivan, played by Chloë Grace Moretz, and a world knocked back to the Stone Age by an alien invasion. The film runs 112 minutes. It was directed by J Blakeson from a screenplay by Susannah Grant, Akiva Goldsman and Jeff Pinkner, based on Rick Yancey’s 2013 novel.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Releasing UK.
Cassie Sullivan and the M4 Carbine
The film opens with Cassie emerging from the woods, armed with an M4 carbine, to raid an abandoned gas station in Ohio. She hears a voice calling for help. Inside, she finds a wounded man who points a gun at her. Each asks the other to lower their weapon. When he pulls his other hand from under his jacket, she mistakes the metallic glint of a cross for a gun and shoots him dead. The screen cuts to black.
That is the film’s best idea, and it spends the next hour and a half failing to earn it.
The backstory is the invasion itself. A colossal alien spaceship circles Earth, guided by extraterrestrial life the film calls “the Others.” What follows is a sequence of catastrophes the film names as waves.
The First Wave Through the Fourth Wave
The First Wave is an EMP. It kills electrical power and communications worldwide and shuts off the engines of moving vehicles, including planes in mid-flight. Ten days after the ship appears, the world stops moving.
The Second Wave lets the Others manipulate geology and fault lines. Earthquakes and megatsunamis destroy coastal cities and islands, including Miami, London, Bangkok and New York City. In Ohio, Lake Erie floods. Cassie and her younger brother Sam, played by Zackary Arthur, escape by climbing a tree.
The Third Wave is a modified strain of bird flu. The population is decimated. Cassie’s mother, Lisa, played by Maggie Siff, is one of the victims.
The Fourth Wave turns humans into killers of other humans. Cassie, Sam and their father, Oliver, played by Ron Livingston, find a summer camp in the woods sheltering about 300 survivors. Then a US Army unit with working vehicles rolls in.
Colonel Vosch and the Buses at the Camp
The unit’s commander is Colonel Alexander Vosch, played by Liev Schreiber. He tells the camp there is an imminent threat of a Fifth Wave. He says the Army will take the children to safety at Wright-Patterson AFB and will bring the buses back for the adults.
Cassie is separated from Sam. That separation is the engine of the rest of the film, and it is the one thread the movie pulls with any conviction.
The cast around Moretz is deep on paper and thin on screen. Nick Robinson plays Ben Parish, also called Zombie. Alex Roe plays Evan Walker. Maria Bello plays Sergeant Reznik. Maika Monroe plays Ringer. Tony Revolori plays Dumbo. Talitha Eliana Bateman plays Teacup. Nadji Jeter plays Poundcake. Most of these names arrive, register, and leave without a scene worth remembering.
What the Waves Actually Cost
A film about the end of the world has to make the end of the world feel like a loss. The 5th Wave lists its catastrophes like a briefing document. Miami, London, Bangkok and New York City fall in a sentence. A mother dies and the film moves on. The waves are inventory, not grief.
Here is the ranking of what the film gets right, in order:
- The gas station opening, which trusts the audience to sit in a bad decision.
- Moretz, who plays Cassie as wary and hard rather than plucky.
- The camp, which briefly suggests a society deciding who gets saved.
- The invasion premise, which is coherent and grim.
- Everything after Cassie loses Sam, which becomes a chase with no cost attached.
The budget was reported between $38 million and $54 million. The film grossed $109.9 million worldwide. By the arithmetic of the industry, that counts as moderately successful. By the arithmetic of the story, it counts as a miss.
The Fifth Wave That Never Lands
The film’s central promise is that a Fifth Wave is coming. Vosch says so. The title says so. The tagline says so. What the film delivers is a setup for a trilogy that the box office did not justify, and the result is a movie that ends where a first act should.
Columbia Pictures picked up the rights to Yancey’s trilogy in March 2012, with Graham King’s GK Films and Tobey Maguire’s Material Pictures. Filming ran in Atlanta, Georgia, from October 2014 to January 2015. That is a long runway for a film this unsure of what it wants to be.
The comparison that matters is not to other alien-invasion movies. It is to the film’s own opening. That gas station scene works because it makes Cassie complicit in a death she cannot undo. Nothing afterward carries that weight. The waves get bigger and the stakes get smaller.
The 5th Wave is not a disaster. It is a shrug, which is worse. It has a strong lead, a clean premise and a first scene that promises a harder movie than the one that follows.
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