J Blakeson
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Alien invaders behave intelligently before acting really, really stupidly in “The 5th Wave,” a tween-oriented sci-fi adventure that synthesizes “They Live,” “The Hunger Games,” and countless other visitors-from-another-world sagas.
So how does The 5th Wave compare to The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Maze Runner, or the other YA novels hitting theaters?
The colors are sometimes too bright for such a grim story, and the shattering of group trauma isn't present (the way it is in the opening scenes of " The Hunger Games ").
Placed in the YA spectrum, “The 5th Wave” wants to be “The Hunger Games,” but with its clunky, goofy plot, it ends up more in line with Bella and her pining over Edward and Jacob with occasional bouts against evil vampires than Katniss and her revolution-inspiring defiance against President Snow.
The 5th Wave joins, or at least aspires to, YA-fiction titans The Hunger Games and the Divergent series.
After “The Hunger Games,” “Divergent” and “The Maze Runner” series have jammed multiplexes in recent years, “The 5th Wave,” indeed, feels like the fifth wave of book-to-screen adaptations of end-of-the-world stories aimed at young adults.
So how does The 5th Wave compare to The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Maze Runner, or the other YA novels hitting theaters?
And in execution, “The 5th Wave” is probably most equal to the “Divergent” series, which also tried to copy “The Hunger Games” but has just become increasingly derivative and convoluted with each installment, like last year’s “Insurgent.”
I haven't read Yancey's source work, but hear it was generally well-received, even if being clearly derivative of and certainly riding the coattails of earlier related works such as the "Hunger Games," "Divergent" and "Maze Runner" franchises.
And although an admittedly decent third-act twist injects some life into the pervasively tedious proceedings, The 5th Wave ultimately falls right in line with such by-the-numbers young-adult fare as the Hunger Games and Divergent series - with the movie's open conclusion sure to provoke groans and eye-rolls from even the hardiest of audience members.
The 5th Wave joins, or at least aspires to, YA-fiction titans The Hunger Games and the Divergent series.
After “The Hunger Games,” “Divergent” and “The Maze Runner” series have jammed multiplexes in recent years, “The 5th Wave,” indeed, feels like the fifth wave of book-to-screen adaptations of end-of-the-world stories aimed at young adults.
Watching Rosamund Pike chew up the screen much in the same way she did in her Oscar nominated performance ala “Gone Girl” makes for a perfect comedic thriller.
Marla has deafening echoes of not just Gone Girl ’s Amy Dunne (a blunt, sliced blonde bob; the icy, clipped voiceover) but also Nicole Kidman’s Suzanne Stone in To Die For .
Featuring a strong performance from Rosamund Pike, who channels the sociopathic iciness that earned her an Oscar nomination for Gone Girl , this is a film that turns the dial in a similar direction for the sake of something more in line with the crime comedies stemming from ways that use the system to feed one’s greed, in addition to empowerment.
Pike is fierce in the role, channeling and expanding upon her portrayal of Amy in Gone Girl.
Impeccably dressed in every scene, taking long drags from her vape pen and exhaling smoke like a dragon, Pike channels the same cold sociopathy that made her Gone Girl performance so captivating.
Thanks to Pike’s icy voiceover narration and other tonal and stylistic overlaps, it’s tough not to be reminded of Gone Girl — which isn’t a bad thing when such devices are employed this well.
The film seems to be in a rush to set out its post-invasion stall and we’re left with a film which places its emphasis on Cassie mooning over Evan (the scene where she virtually flutters her eyelashes on seeing him taking a topless wash in a lake can only elicit sniggers from the audience) and scenes which evoke unwanted memories of the lifeless Ender’s Game as the military-enlisted kids are trained for battle.
This is a staggeringly incompetent piece of filmmaking, which takes two wholly different films—one’s a teen romance with dystopian trappings, like The Hunger Games; the other’s a teen action-adventure film in the paranoid vein, like Ender’s Game—and tries to weld them together with shoddy dialogue and hormones.
He’s now a child recruit in a new scheme the U.S. army has to combat the aliens — very Ender’s Game — and Cassie must get to the Ohio base where he’s being trained, and where, we see, everyone keeps talking about “the fifth wave” of attacks they presume is imminent.
And the military-movie posturing between the kid recruits comes across as just short of laughable, as though the film is shooting for Ender's Game coldness, and instead winds up with a G-rated, junior-grade version of Starship Troopers camp.
If it's not The Maze Runner, Tomorrow When The War Began or Ender's Game, then it's a dystopian variant on a story of struggle and survival: The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Giver, for example.
Audiences will be able to pinpoint the exact moment at which The 5th Wave starts to buckle under its franchise obligations, as well as the debts it owes to recent entries in this genre, from Kevin MacDonald’s more nightmarish How I Live Now to Gavin Hood’s Ender’s Game adaptation.
Marla has deafening echoes of not just Gone Girl ’s Amy Dunne (a blunt, sliced blonde bob; the icy, clipped voiceover) but also Nicole Kidman’s Suzanne Stone in To Die For .
But lesbians taking on the mob aren’t necessarily new, and Blakeson doesn’t quite match the delicious energies exhibited in the Wachowski’s 1996 debut Bound , if mostly because the ice-cold Marla doesn’t build any believable heat or energy with Fern, who, if push actually came to shove, would likely be expendable in her scheming.
Despite insisting that she doesn’t need help, Jennifer is court-ordered out of her house and into the imprisoning corridors of the Berkshire Oaks retirement home – a bravura sequence executed with a Kafka-esque efficiency that reminded me of Steven Soderbergh’s nightmarish Unsane .
The frustrating scenario is almost breathlessly exacerbating as Wiest’s unassuming Jennifer Pederson is browbeaten and held against her will, in ways which recall Soderbergh’s highlighting of medical institutions as potential prisons in Unsane (2018).
Together with a cute boy (Nick Robinson) she has a crush on from school days and a random hunk (Alex Roe) who saves her from a sniper, she must lead humanity’s teen remnant to an “Independence Day”-style showdown that this Dollar Tree blockbuster can’t quite afford to stage.
The storyline is generic apocalyptic science fiction and feels a lot like an uninspired fusion of Independence Day and the TV mini-series “V”.
Natural disasters hit, the enemy is among us, and although the alien apocalypse grows campy at times, Blakeson maintains a grounded balance in this spiritual successor to Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Independence Day.
There are flashes of “Independence Day,” “The Day After Tomorrow” and “Biohazard.”
Evoking everything from Independence Day and The Road to Starship Troopers and Red Dawn - in addition to almost every YA sci-fi offering - The 5th Wave will surprise nobody, introducing a procession of stock-character types into well-worn narrative arcs.
Shortly after their gargantuan ship appears in the sky, all “Independence Day” portentousness, they cut the world’s power with an electromagnetic pulse in their invasion’s first wave.
Alien invaders behave intelligently before acting really, really stupidly in “The 5th Wave,” a tween-oriented sci-fi adventure that synthesizes “They Live,” “The Hunger Games,” and countless other visitors-from-another-world sagas.
Cassie manages to escape the compulsory recruitment, but her kid brother—whose teddy bear she was trying to retrieve when the buses pull away—doesn't, alongside a band of teens and tweens who're given M16s and helmets that allow them to see the aliens living inside their hosts' skulls (a flourish more or less ripped off from John Carpenter's They Live ).
In a nod to/ripoff of John Carpenter’s They Live , you can only tell who’s an alien by peering through special lenses that reveal a squidlike critter inside the skull of a host.
So how does The 5th Wave compare to The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Maze Runner, or the other YA novels hitting theaters?
Like in The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner , price young people take center stage early on in this drama.
If part of YA’s appeal is that it provides a fantasy of independence from parents at a time when young people find it deferred longer than ever, Enrique Chediak’s glossless digital photography locates The 5th Wave very much in the here and now, investing it with the same earthiness he gave 2014’s The Maze Runner.
This sci-fi fantasy, from the first book in Rick Yancey’s ongoing YA series, mimics the riffs (feisty heroine, hunky boys, dystopian setting, devious adult corporations, potential love triangles etc) but lacks the cinematic legs of The Hunger Games or The Maze Runner .
After “The Hunger Games,” “Divergent” and “The Maze Runner” series have jammed multiplexes in recent years, “The 5th Wave,” indeed, feels like the fifth wave of book-to-screen adaptations of end-of-the-world stories aimed at young adults.
In young adult hits of the same genre, such as “The Hunger Games,” “Divergent” or “The Maze Runner” the metaphor has a bit more freedom because the worlds in which they take place are visually fantastical, and therefore removed from our reality.
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
influenced I Care a Lot (2021)
Characters Themes
She evokes the magic found in performances like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street and more recently Hugh Jackman in Bad Education.
Films as different from each other as “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “I, Tonya,” “The Big Short” and now “I Care a Lot” seem to be onto something — the bad behavior is a pretty good time, and they’re a little bit serious about the implications of living a life free from ethics and morals and pesky legalities.
(Imagine the kinetic cool of the Ocean’s trilogy swirled with the manic noxiousness of The Wolf of Wall Street and you’re halfway there.)
What this ongoing YA adaptation cycle of dystopian and post-apocalyptic killer-teen movies really needs is a Starship Troopers : a film that could put the lie to the genre by exaggerating it into pitch-black, poker-faced satire.
Evoking everything from Independence Day and The Road to Starship Troopers and Red Dawn - in addition to almost every YA sci-fi offering - The 5th Wave will surprise nobody, introducing a procession of stock-character types into well-worn narrative arcs.
This could be an opportunity for a subversive and satirical text, and at times, “The 5th Wave” comes close to feeling like Paul Verhoeven’s great propaganda parody “Starship Troopers,” particularly in the scenes of the young kids suiting up for battle - a small blonde girl in full tactical gear and a long rifle is just funny (or is it?).
And the military-movie posturing between the kid recruits comes across as just short of laughable, as though the film is shooting for Ender's Game coldness, and instead winds up with a G-rated, junior-grade version of Starship Troopers camp.
The film takes some of its cues from the 1946 cult classic “Bedlam” (great title) with the master Boris Karloff in a diabolical role.
She’s a “cold goddess,” in the words of Grace Kelly’s similarly drawn Tracy in High Society (1956) .
The Vanishing (1988)
Directed by George Sluizer
influenced The Disappearance of Alice Creed (2009)
Visuals
Blakeson has a natural flair for scene-blocking, utilising the confined setting with great skill; his film can stand alongside similar thrillers such as Sidney Lumet’s Deathtrap (1982), George Sluizer’s Spoorloos (aka The Vanishing, 1988) and Daisuke Gotô delicately-titled Japanese shocker Girl in Captivity: Psycho Torture Chamber (2008).
She’s a satirical encapsulation of American capitalism gone haywire in the mold of Chuck Tatum from “Ace in the Hole” or Lou Bloom from “Nightcrawler,” antiheroes who spy profit where others see pain.
Instead, it recalls such ‘90s exercises in post-Tarantino nihilism as Very Bad Things.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Directed by Philip Kaufman
influenced The 5th Wave (2016)
Plot
“The 5th Wave” shares elements with such science fiction classics as Robert Heinlein's “The Puppet Masters” and Jack Finney's “The Body Snatchers,” which became the classic sci-fi film, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956).
But Brooklyn’s star Saoirse Ronan herself made an ill-conceived YA alien invasion movie (the unwatchable The Host ), and survived intact.
Quality-wise, “The 5th Wave” is reminiscent less of “The Hunger Games” than of Andrew Niccol’s pallid screen version of “Twilight” maven Stephenie Meyer’s “The Host.”
Like Alice Creed , which carried flavors of early Neil Marshall as well as Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave , I Care a Lot also feels indebted to Blakeson’s fellow UK genre filmmakers.