The 5th Wave (2016)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 2016
	Director: J Blakeson (The Disappearance of Alice Creed)
	Actors: Chloë Grace Moretz (Kick-Ass 1-2), Matthew Zuk, Gabriela Lopez, Nick Robinson (Jurassic World), Liev Schreiber (Scream 1-3, X-men Origins: Wolverine)
	Country: USA
	Genre: SF, Action, Romance
	Conditions of visioning: 30.12.2017, VOD, 40" TV screen
Synopsis: When Aliens hit Earth with successive attack waves, high-school student Cassie (Grace Moretz) will have to evolve to survive and rescue her little brother.
Review: If you often read this blog, you may know that I am a sucker for Alien invasion stories which I found too rare in the past but which are now more and more numerous. The trailer of this movie made it tempting to watch, which I finally did now that it is available on Netflix. What a disappointment! The story of successive attack waves (Darkness, Destruction, Infection, Invasion) is original and made the success of the novel I guess. It is shown as flashbacks to focus more on the 5th wave of the title, but I already noticed something was fishy in the story-telling when the main character still lives in a clean house and packs her school book while the World is ending and its population mostly decimated. I have a very good memory of the director's first full-length feature The Disappearance of Alice Creed with Gemma Arterton dating from 2009 already. It was nice to see Chloë Grace Moretz who has quickly grown up since Kick-Ass and its sequel, as well as the too rare Liev Schreiber (whom I recently saw in The Manchurian Candidate), but the editing of the two stories unfolding in parallel is weird, seeming like two different movies edited together. And I can complain about both: the one with the military tried to find any excuse to have teenagers in the main role like in Ender's Game but in a much clumsier way (Oh it is much easier to identify the Aliens in teenagers as in adults so let's recruit only children!?!). And the story following the character of Grace Moretz embarrassingly converges to ... a young adult love triangle with the cute Nick Robinson (Jurassic World) and the "perfect blue eyes and three-day beard" Alex Roe, I guess inspired by Twilight which I still haven't seen. And 15 minutes before the end I was utterly annoyed to realize that the movie would call for sequels, like the book did as I learned later on, although the possible follow-up The Infinite Sea is not yet green-lighted because of the poor box-office results of this one. So what I hoped to be a nice alien invasion film turned out to be an attempt at starting a lucrative pseudo-SF franchise aimed at young adults like Twilight, The Hunger Games, Maze Runner, The Mortal Instruments or Divergent before it.
Rating: 2 /10