Meanwhile, Cassie is tramping through the woods, en route to the military base to reclaim her brother. There are plenty of shoot-outs in 'The 5th Wave,' but no interminable aerial combat.

This wrinkle is the pic's savviest, allowing Blakeson to emphasize the personal and earthbound. Their task of defending the planet against the imminent fifth wave is complicated by the discovery that 'the others,' as the aliens are called throughout, can assume human form. They're joined by Ringer, a tough cookie who was kicked out of her last unit for disciplinary issues, played with scene-stealing relish by Maika Monroe ('It Follows'). Taken to an army base and given the nickname Nugget, the boy is enlisted to fight the invaders in a squad led by his sister's old crush, Ben Parish (Nick Robinson). She's promptly left in the dust, as the tyke wails on the back seat. In the most contrived narrative transition in the film, Cassie gets off the bus when her little brother insists she find his teddy bear. He entreats parents to put their children on buses so they can be taken away to a secure location. 'Nowhere is safe anymore,' he tells her.īefore long, Liev Schreiber rolls in at the head of a phalanx of tanks. They lob in to a nearby campsite turned tent-city, where Cassie's father gives her a gun. Soon the family is strapping packs to their back and abandoning their house. Cassie and her brother narrowly escape the rushing waters of a burst dam at home in Ohio, while coastal cities suffer the worst of it. All this is condensed by the film into a short flashback as prelude. Next come floods, then avian flu, then a ground invasion.

Soon after, an electromagnetic pulse takes out the world's power - the first phase. Everything changed, Cassie tells us in a voiceover, when an alien craft appeared in the sky. Her Dad (Ron Livingston) gives her an appreciative thumbs-up, and she goes to say goodnight to her little brother ('Transparent's' Zackary Arthur) by serenading him to sleep. If that sounds tantalizingly like a retread of the sci-fi blockbuster that Moretz's character headlined in 'Clouds of Sils Maria,' the new film is both more engaging and just as generic as that movie-within-a-movie.Ĭassie is the kind of girl who gets home from a party and ducks her head around her parents' door so they know she's made curfew. Adapted from Rick Yancey's 2013 novel, 'The 5th Wave' stars Chloe Grace Moretz as Cassie Sullivan, a high school student whose world is upended when aliens invade. Another week, another plucky teenage girl with the fate of the world on her shoulders, buffeted by smoldering glances from two strong, yet sensitive, young men.

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