It makes trust harder, since anyone could be an alien, but it's overtly more a plot device than a dread the characters internalize or examine. And if the protagonists are threatened with takeover as well, as they are in films from Body Snatchers to The Host, it connects to the equally common, equally naked terror of losing physical or mental control.īut The 5th Wave's biggest disappointment is the way it handles body-theft as a mundane, almost casual threat. The idea of aliens stealing human bodies is a classic science-fiction trope, and with good reason: it cuts to the core of our lizard-brain fears that it's impossible to know what other people are really thinking, or what they might be concealing. The 5th Wave treats body theft as a casual threat In the fourth, the aliens themselves arrive, taking over select humans as a form of perfect disguise. In the third, an engineered super-disease tears through the survivors. In the second, earthquakes and floods devastate the world. In the first wave, all vehicles and power stop working.
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That ordinary world is eradicated when aliens arrive, bringing a series of catastrophes that wipe out much of humanity. Briefly, the film does find some resonance in the way calamity instantly puts a nostalgic gloss on every mundane memory about parties, crushes, and family hangout time. "When you're in high school, just about everything seems like the end of the world," 16-year-old Cassie Sullivan muses in an early-film flashback to her pre-apocalypse life. And the film version doesn't have many distinctive elements to flesh out that framework, or to make this look different from any of the other dystopian post-apocalypse novels that have flooded teen-lit shelves over the past decade. But that means it's working from a familiar framework about teen empowerment in crisis.
It feels more commercially conscious than culturally conscious: it's out to build a franchise and an ensemble of tough, lovable characters capable of selling another two films. At best, it tries to tap into the way the Hunger Games books and films turned embattled teen-girl heroes into a profitable cinematic movement, and Twilight turned teen love triangles featuring dangerous, exotic boys into a craze. The film, which adapts Rick Yancey's bestselling 2013 young-adult novel, doesn't tap into any particular collective concern, or into any ideas larger than a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other action-adventure. Which is part of the reason an alien-invasion drama like The 5th Wave feels so fundamentally hollow. And the urge to angst over whether any given new form of technology will wither our humanity is as old as the genre, and as new as Ex Machina's fresh take on the theme. Anxieties over the space race became a dominant theme in science fiction from Sputnik to Alien. Invasion Of The Body Snatchers turned the 1950s' communism-related paranoia into an eerie metaphor. Metropolis expressed fears about the class divide back in the 1920s.
The greatest science-fiction films, like the greatest horror films, usually channel the sublimated terrors of their era.
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