Respond to these rapid questions in our The 5th Wave quiz and we will tell you which The 5th Wave character you are. Play it now.
“The 5th Wave” has a difficult time setting the tone and establishing the mood right away. Cassie Sullivan (Chloe Grace Moretz), a teenage girl armed with an automatic weapon, finds herself in a standoff with a wounded soldier who is pleading for his life in an abandoned mini mart. Throughout the film, close-ups of Moretz’s terrified face predominate. Cassie’s voiceover then comes on, informing us that she was once a “typical” teenage girl before everything happened. Those words are a betrayal of the character created by Rick Yancey in his popular YA series, Divergent. The character of Cassie is anything but “normal” in the book, but onscreen, Moretz hasn’t been given a role she can get her teeth into. Cassie never comes to life onscreen, and the film doesn’t come to life either if Cassie isn’t there. Even the most harrowing scenes (mass executions, family reunions, and farewells) are a stale bore.
Cassie lives with her parents (Ron Livingston and Maggie Siff), as well as her younger brother Sam, in a house in the country (Zackary Arthur). When a mysterious object appears in the sky above the planet, her “normal” life comes crashing down around her. After that, the aliens known as “The Others” launch a series of “waves” of attacks on the planet Earth. The first wave is a powerful electromagnetic pulse that knocks out power across the entire world in seconds. Planes are plummeting from the sky. The second wave is characterized by a series of tsunamis that completely devastate coastal areas. The third wave is a plague that will claim the lives of millions more people. The fourth wave is comprised of snipers who stalk and assassinate the survivors from the previous waves. And the arrival of the fifth wave, which is currently unknown, is imminent.
Cassie’s mother perishes as a result of the plague. In the woods, the rest of the family establishes a makeshift refugee camp for themselves and their children (where everyone is armed to the teeth). Military tanks arrive (the military is immune to the power outage, for reasons that are never explained), and the intimidating Colonel Vosch (Liev Schreiber) transports the children away in school buses to an undisclosed location, promising the panicked adults that they will follow shortly afterward. Cassie is forced to flee through the woods, clutching her little brother’s beloved teddy bear, after Vosch, who appears to be a savior who takes charge, reveals that he has more plans for her.
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Cassie’s journey is divided into two parts: Cassie’s journey and the journey of her high school crush, Ben Parish (Nick Robinson, believable as a boy who has been completely traumatized). A sniper shoots Cassie in the leg as she camps in the woods in search of her brother. Cassie is saved by a farm-boy named Evan Walker after he rescues her from the woods (Alex Roe). Evan is kind and considerate, but he is also mysterious. And he’s rock-hard abs to go with his blazing baby-blues. Suppose Cassie had been saved by a man who appeared to be Wilford Brimley. What would have happened then? (The Evan Walker section of the book is extremely strange and suspenseful.) It takes on an embarrassing “Blue Lagoon” quality in this scene, especially when she looks longingly at his sculpted torso while he is bathing in a river.)
The 5th Wave Quiz
Ben Parish is taken away with the other children to an Air Force Base, where he will undergo military training in preparation for the upcoming battle against The Others. The trash-talking kid-soldiers play poker in their barracks and go through weapons training, all while being kept under the strict supervision of Colonel Vosch’s tenacious medical assistant (Maria Bello). There’s an inadvertent absurdity to the kid-soldier episodes, especially when Ben, the squad leader, yells at one of his comrades while under enemy fire: “Keep low!” (The child is unable to refrain from “staying low.”) The child stands at just over three feet tall. His rifle is significantly taller than he is.) A new member of Ben’s squad, a deadpan teenage girl nick-named Ringer (Maika Monroe, who gives a fun performance), challenges his authority but proves to be a valuable asset in battle when Ben needs her. She has the ability to shoot at a moving target.
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One of director J. Blakeson’s and production designer Jon Billington’s greatest assets are the apocalyptic wasteland scenes: a highway full of crashed cars, bodies piled high in a field, orange fires burning through an otherwise dark landscape, and so on. While the colors are sometimes too vibrant for such a bleak story, there isn’t any evidence of the shattering of group trauma (the way it is in the opening scenes of “The Hunger Games”). Cassie’s desperation to track down her brother is overly sentimentalized (so many closeups of that teddy bear). Cassie is tormented by grief and rage throughout the novel. Here, she just appears a little taken aback and, at times, even a little terrified. Despite the fact that Moretz is an excellent actress, she is unable to give Cassie the depth that “The 5th Wave” requires of her. While squatting in the woods for what appears to be several weeks at a time, her hair remains freshly shampooed throughout the experience. (Details are important.) “The 5th Wave” is a dystopian version of reality.
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In the case of a book that is being adapted for the screen, there are a variety of reasons why some tangential plot points must be eliminated. Yet the screenwriting team that worked on the adaptation of Yancey’s novel, Susannah Grant, Akiva Goldsman, and Jeff Pinkner, has done a disservice to the book’s rich texture. Perhaps it is unfair to judge a film adaptation on the basis of the source material, but when problems arise in such situations, they are almost always due to a problem with the adaptation. Even worse, it may lead audiences to believe that the book is just as ridiculous as the movie.
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Those who enjoy post-apocalyptic fiction have a strong desire to imagine our own annihilation, a desire that is prickled with anxiety-inducing questions: “What would I do if I found myself in this situation? How would I fare in this situation?” Such tales can be found in abundance in literature. “Ozymandias,” a poem by Mary Shelley, depicts a crumbling statue of an ancient king in the sands of the desert. After World War I, European desolation is expressed in T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men,” which includes images of broken columns and fading stars, as well as the famous final lines, “This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but with a whimper.” Authors Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” and Stephen King’s “The Mist,” H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds,” 1950s science fiction movies, and comic books all laid the groundwork for the Dystopian Literary Craze in which we now live… Lois Lowry’s dystopian novel “The Giver,” written for a young adult audience in 1993, marked the beginning of a new era of dystopian novels for teenagers. Suzanne Collins’ wildly popular “Hunger Games” franchise has inspired a slew of knockoffs and sequels. Were Anne of Green Gables published today, the plucky red-headed orphan would have to crawl through an industrial wasteland before she could garner any attention from the authorities. Rick Yancey’s trilogy (the final installment of which is scheduled for release in May 2016) is filled with haunting imagery of a world that has been left more than half-empty, but most chillingly, he understands tyranny and how it operates: if you can get a crowd of confused and frightened people to line up and march towards the exits in an orderly fashion, you’re halfway to having complete control over them.
In the film, these crucial elements are only loosely sketched in and not fully developed. Instead, we’re left with Cassie and Evan exchanging longing glances, muddled monologues in which people try to figure out what the “5th wave” is, and tepid reunion scenes that lack impact. A cliche, to be sure, but one that Cassie in the book, with her raw, tenderized heart, would never have tolerated in the closing narration.
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