The 5th Wave

I remember the specific exhaustion of 2016. It was the year we collectively realized that maybe, just maybe, we didn’t need every single Young Adult novel adapted into a four-part cinematic universe. The 5th Wave arrived at the tail end of that gold rush, landing in theaters just as the public’s appetite for teenagers-in-combat-boots was hitting a wall. I watched this again recently on my laptop while my cat, Barnaby, spent ten minutes aggressively trying to eat a piece of discarded crinkly plastic wrap in the corner. Honestly, the suspense of whether he’d choke was more intense than the "First Wave" of the alien invasion, but it gave the whole viewing experience a frantic, DIY survivalist energy that actually kind of fit the mood.

A Disaster Movie in Search of a Genre

The film opens with a genuine sense of dread. We see Chloë Grace Moretz as Cassie Sullivan, scavenging through a trashed convenience store with a M4 carbine slung over her shoulder. It’s a sharp, effective hook. The first act fast-forwards through the "waves": an EMP (The 1st), massive tsunamis (The 2nd), a plague (The 3rd), and the "Others" taking human form (The 4th). Director J Blakeson handles the global destruction with a workmanlike efficiency, though the CGI flood looks like a high-end screensaver from a mid-range Dell laptop.

Once the world is sufficiently ruined, the film shifts gears into something far more intimate and, frankly, weirder. Cassie is separated from her younger brother and hitches her star to a mysterious woodsman named Evan Walker, played by Alex Roe. Meanwhile, her high school crush Ben "Zombie" Parish, played by a very game Nick Robinson, is drafted into a child army by a terrifyingly stern Maria Bello. It’s here that the movie starts to wobble under the weight of its own tropes. It wants to be Independence Day, but it also wants to be Twilight and Full Metal Jacket. By trying to check every box, it ends up feeling like a "Greatest Hits" compilation of better dystopian movies.

Boot Camp and Bad Romance

The action choreography is a bit of a mixed bag. The survivalist sequences in the woods have a nice, tactile grit to them, but once we move to the military base, things get sterilized. The training sequences featuring Nick Robinson and a young Maika Monroe (who brings a much-needed edge to the proceedings) are shot with a flat, TV-movie aesthetic that misses the "kinetic" energy—wait, let’s avoid that word—it misses the punch of a big-budget blockbuster.

The physical reality of the stunts is there, but the stakes often feel theoretical. We’re told the world is over, but Cassie’s hair remains remarkably well-conditioned throughout the apocalypse. My biggest gripe, however, is the central romance. The romantic subplot has the chemistry of two wet sponges being rubbed together. When Cassie discovers Evan’s "secret"—which anyone who has seen a movie in the last twenty years will guess within five minutes—the emotional payoff feels unearned. It’s a shame, because Chloë Grace Moretz is a fantastic actress who can sell almost anything, but even she struggles to make "I fell in love with you while watching you through the woods" feel like anything other than a restraining order waiting to happen.

The Cult of the Discontinued Franchise

What makes The 5th Wave interesting now, in our era of "Franchise Fatigue," is its status as a tombstone for a specific type of filmmaking. It was designed from the ground up to be a trilogy-starter, but the box office numbers and critical shrugs meant the story effectively ended on a cliffhanger. In the years since, it has found a strange second life on streaming platforms. There’s a dedicated pocket of the internet—mostly fans of the Rick Yancey novels—who treat this film with a fierce, defensive loyalty.

They obsess over the "what ifs." What if the sequel, The Infinite Sea, had been made? What if the budget had been doubled? This "cult of the unfinished" gives the film a layer of meta-tragedy. It’s a snapshot of a moment when Hollywood was desperate to find the next Katniss Everdeen and instead found a reminder that audiences can tell when they’re being sold a blueprint rather than a finished house. Despite its flaws, there is something nostalgic about it now. It represents the last gasp of the mid-budget YA era before everything was swallowed by the MCU or relegated to a six-episode Netflix miniseries.

If you’re looking for a breezy, slightly goofy alien invasion flick to kill an afternoon, you could do much worse. It’s competently made, features some solid performances from Ron Livingston and Maggie Siff, and moves at a clip that respects your time. Just don’t expect it to change your life or explain why the aliens had such a convoluted five-step plan when they could have just dropped a big rock on us and called it a day. It’s a relic of a very specific 2010s trend, best enjoyed with a large bowl of popcorn and a cat who hopefully isn't eating plastic.