The 5th Wave – Reviewed by David Turpin

Directed by J. Blakeson

Starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Nick Robinson, Alex Roe, Liev Schreiber.

Director J. Blakeson’s teenage science-fiction opus takes its title from the imminent fifth attack by alien invaders bent on the elimination of human life.  These sketchily motivated creatures could have taken a leaf out of the filmmakers’ book:  this lethally dull production manages to kill its franchise hopes in one fell swoop.

The film begins with a deceptively witty touch, as the appearance of the Sony and Columbia logos is accompanied by the kind of speaker-rumbling synth groan that always signals the presence of our alien overlords.  It’s downhill all the way from there, however, as we get a taste of the life of clean-cut Ohio teenager Cassie (Chloë Grace Moretz), before said flavourless existence is upended by what must be the most cheaply realised extra-terrestrial attack this side of the SyFy Channel.  Separated from her younger brother Sam (Zackary Arthur), Cassie spends the bulk of the film trying to locate him in the ravaged remains of North American society so that she can return his teddy bear.  Little does she know, he’s been conscripted into a child army by sinister military commander Liev Schreiber (cashing a cheque).

Moretz can be a compelling performer, usually when playing sulking brats (as in Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria).  Here, she is plainly fishing for a teen-oriented vehicle to rival Kirsten Stewart’s Twilight series or Jennifer Lawrence’s Hunger Games saga.  Whatever the demerits of the first Twilight film, it produced a strange gravity through the commitment of Stewart’s performance, and the empathy of director Catherine Hardwicke.  Both are notably absent in The 5th Wave, as Moretz pouts and poses her way through the apocalypse with preening indifference, while her intermittent voice-over – a direct clone of Stewart’s hilariously overheated narration in Twilight – serves to explicate an already simplistic plot.

Much of the second half of the film is devoted to setting up an asinine love triangle between Cassie and two interchangeable beaus:  high school sweetheart Ben (Nick Robinson), whose nickname ‘Zombie’ is unfortunately apposite, and mysterious woodsman Evan (Alex Roe).  Moretz doesn’t really ‘do’ chemistry with other actors – a weakness that hobbled her last attempt at teen romance in 2014’s trite If I Stay – so here we are to infer romantic sparks from a series of ludicrously obvious set-ups in which Cassie watches Evan chop wood or bathe in a river.

The remainder of the cast fail to elevate the thin gruel they’re served.  Maria Bello, an often underrated actress, gives what must be the worst performance of her career as a barking drill-sergeant.  Maika Monroe, meanwhile, who anchored last year’s well-received horror yarn It Follows, is saddled with a grimly obvious supporting role as a hard-bitten girl soldier presumably intended as a rival for Ben’s affections in future instalments.  Stranger things have happened – but given the appropriately desolate January release date into which the film has been dumped, it seems there’s little danger of a sixth wave troubling us any time soon.