Liev Schreiber distinguishes himself as the base commander, alternating warmth with menace, and doling out stirring inspirational speeches on cue. But the scenes on the base are awkwardly, inconsistently handled. Meanwhile, Cassie's little brother Sam (Zackary Arthur, from Transparent) and her crush-object Ben (Nick Robinson, recently of Jurassic World) have more reasons to give grim, buttoned-down performances as they're subsumed into an Air Force base where the military is training children as soldiers. When Roe earnestly reveals a life-changing secret from his past, he does it with the bland, sleazy earnestness of a dude telling his current fling that he hasn't actually gotten around to breaking up with his last girlfriend yet, but he was just about to text her, really.
And the film version doesn't have many distinctive elements to flesh out that framework, or to make this look different from any of the other dystopian post-apocalypse novels that have flooded teen-lit shelves over the past decade.īut neither Moretz nor Roe connects with the emotions behind the checklist. But that means it's working from a familiar framework about teen empowerment in crisis. It feels more commercially conscious than culturally conscious: it's out to build a franchise and an ensemble of tough, lovable characters capable of selling another two films.
At best, it tries to tap into the way the Hunger Games books and films turned embattled teen-girl heroes into a profitable cinematic movement, and Twilight turned teen love triangles featuring dangerous, exotic boys into a craze. The film, which adapts Rick Yancey's bestselling 2013 young-adult novel, doesn't tap into any particular collective concern, or into any ideas larger than a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other action-adventure.
Which is part of the reason an alien-invasion drama like The 5th Wave feels so fundamentally hollow.
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