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Movie Review: 'The 5th Wave'

By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - With Twilight and The Hunger Games franchises behind us, and Divergent and The Maze Runner about to be, other potential young adult properties will surface to prevent any YA movie vacuum.

Which brings us to The 5th Wave.

Based on the best-selling 2013 novel by Rick Yancey, the first of a trilogy, The 5th Wave is a post-apocalyptic, teen-centric science fiction thriller.

Chloe Grace Moretz stars as Cassie Sullivan, a teenager living in Ohio, who has lost her parents and most of her friends during a series of increasingly devastating attacks on Earth by technologically advanced aliens.

2½
(2½ stars out of 4)

These interplanetary marauders, referred to as 'The Others,' showed up one day when an enormous floating spacecraft suddenly appeared in the sky and have since left destroyed most of Earth.

So the former everyday schoolgirl -- an ordinary youngster finding herself in extraordinary circumstances -- now struggles to survive, and along the way transforms herself into a bona fide guerilla fighter.

Thus far – and we're brought up to date in flashbacks -- there have been four waves of attacks, four different types: the first was a wave of electrical outages, the second natural disasters, the third fatal diseases, and the fourth body-snatching invaders.

Now the few remaining humans are braced for an unimaginable but imminent fifth wave.

The Others, a faceless ruling force who can assume human form and seem to be trying to dismantle the traditional American family structure, appear to be intent on killing all humans except the children, whom they instead keep in refugee camps.

That's where Cassie's younger brother, Sam (Zackary Arthur), finds himself while Cassie tries desperately to rescue him.

Meanwhile, on the romantic front, Cassie is torn between stock characters: classmate and ex-crush Ben Parish (Nick Robinson) and inscrutable farm boy Evan Walker (Alex Roe).

We've watched Chloe Grace Moretz grow up on-screen in such films as Kick-Ass and Hugo and Let Me In and The Equalizer, and she's more than up to the task of bringing to The 5th Wave the same kind of thoughtful pluckiness that Jennifer Lawrence has brought to The Hunger Games, Kristen Stewart to Twilight, and Shailene Woodley to Divergent.

But as glossy and energetic as The 5th Wave is, there is a certain lack of ambition about it, and something overly familiar about the end-of-the-world thrust, the kids-in-combat action scenes, and the emerging teen romantic triangle.

That's because director J Blakeson, in only his second film (The Disappearance of Alice Creed), mixes these elements as if they are being crossed off on a generic to-do list.

The screenplay by Susannah Grant (an Oscar nominee for Erin Brockovich), Akiva Goldsman (an Oscar winner for A Beautiful Mind and the writer of last year's Insurgent), and Jeff Pinkner, offers the independence-from-authority fantasy that all the YA properties traffic in, meanwhile wondering if humanity is doomed as it places itself in triumph-of-the-human-spirit territory.

But the been-there-done-that pedal is pushed to the floor; that is, the more films of its ilk you've seen, the less stimulating you'll find it.

And, as is the case in many first installments of proposed franchises, the film feels incomplete, as if it's merely on the way to somewhere and is saving something for later – which it undoubtedly is. In other words, it doesn't end so much as stop.

Liev Schreiber and Maria Bello stop by as suspicious military personnel, while Ron Livingston plays Cassie's father, offering a few familiar faces that lend a bit of authority. Not quite enough, though.

So we'll struggle against 2-1/2 stars out of 4. The 5th Wave is watchable without being satisfying and competent without being exciting.

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