She shines when she’s reacting to body bags and gunfire, but she doesn’t carry any of that history with her. Moretz delivers a serviceable performance, but there’s rarely any subtext to her work.
#Book the 5th wave movie#
The movie effectively recaps what happened to the Sullivan family, tossing out quite a few haunting visuals and details in the process, but when it hits the point when Cassie is separated and must carry the movie solo, the script nearly forgets what she’s fighting for. Sweet story, right? I’d do just about anything for my sibling so it’s only natural to be moved by the idea to a degree, but Cassie’s mission to find Sammy is noticeably hollow, especially compared to how it’s presented in the source material. She was separated from her little brother Sammy ( Zackary Arthur) when she missed the bus to a military refuge at Wright-Patterson and now she’s determined to reach him, even if it means risking her life in the process. That’s about where the 5th Wave begins, with Cassie Sullivan ( Chloe Moretz) trying to survive alone in the woods with the threat of silencers all around her.
The fourth and current wave is the “silencers.” (The term only appears in the book, not the film, but I use it here for simplicity’s sake.) Turns out, the ET visitors have the ability to inhabit human bodies, making it impossible to tell who’s truly human and who’s being manipulated by the enemy and trying to wipe out survivors. The third wave was a plague that successfully eliminated the large majority of the remaining population courtesy of the horrifyingly efficient carriers, birds. The second was a tidal wave that took out a good deal of the population living along the coastlines. The first wave was an EMP that wiped out all electricity. To start, here’s the necessary background information one day, an alien ship appeared and attacked the earth in waves. Ricky Yancey’s book, The 5th Wave, had the potential to go the distance, but the writers behind the film adaptation absolutely butcher the source material, stripping it of all nuance and instead just running through a Hunger Games wannabe check list. Another year, another attempt to turn a dystopia-set young adult novel with a strong female lead into the next blockbuster sensation.