Enter the army, overseen by Colonel Vosch (Liev Schreiber), who is eager to ship the kids off to another site - although Cassie gets left behind. After surviving the chaos thus far, she settles into a refugee camp with her father (Ron Livingston) and younger brother, Sam (Zackary Arthur).
Via journal entries rendered on screen as flashbacks, she describes the day a giant floating spacecraft appeared over the planet, then fleshes out the subsequent waves of destruction. Indeed, the earnest narration that follows sets the standard, as Cassie informs the audience in trite teen soundbites that her life is now far from normal. That’s the feature’s most interesting element, though any thoughtfulness quickly gives way to cliché. In its opening scene, The Fifth Wave establishes its fascination with the impact of extreme circumstances upon the mindset of ordinary people. She might be compelled to shoot in what she thinks is a kill-or-be-killed scenario, but she’s also troubled by her actions. There, she finds a man holding a gun but begging her not to fire her own weapon. When we first meet protagonist Cassie Sullivan (Chloë Grace Moretz), she’s running through the forest, then making her way cautiously through an empty convenience store. Sony has snapped up the rights to all three. In print, The Fifth Wave is the first book in a trilogy, with the final installment set to be published in mid 2016. Should the target market warm to it - and given the recent trend, that’s certainly possible, albeit with more modest success than its predecessors - a spate of sequels is likely. A dystopian premise, plucky heroine, and potential love triangle combine in a movie that’s as generic as it sounds, complete with a just-as-standard alien invasion plotline thrown in. Shades of those four features colour this J Blakeson-directed feature, his second after 2009 thriller The Disappearance of Alice Creed. It feels padded, its focus on establishing a springboard for future sequels rather than satisfactorily exploring its own narrative Retracing the footsteps of Twilight, The Hunger Games, Divergent, and The Maze Runner series, it joins the ever-growing list of efforts keen to jump on the teen-focused franchise bandwagon. In adapting Rick Yancy’s young adult novel of the same name, the film also rides another wave.
A series of attacks against humanity fuels The Fifth Wave, with the earth’s populace struggling to survive an electronic pulse, natural disasters, avian flu, and, finally, the systematic picking off of all the stragglers left behind.