My Review of "The 5th Wave"

The marketing of The 5th Wave was not kind. I haven't even heard of this title until I noticed it on Netflix. The concept of the movie was pretty interesting but the way that they handled the situations in the movie was a little odd.

This movie came out in 2016. How did I not hear about this movie for 4 years? The concept is pretty simple. There's this alien intelligence that has come to earth. I guess everything is all a mystery until they start reeking havoc on humans across the globe.

These terrible acts come in waves hence the name of the movie. The first wave that hit everyone hard was the elimination of electricity. I already have an issue with this but I'll explain this later on.

The second wave that hit had to do with natural disasters. There's earthquakes and then a giant tsunami that hits the world. So coastal areas are pretty kaput because the oceans will have swept them in.

The third wave consisted of illnesses. Apparently the aliens had spread some avian flu across the globe wiping out millions of people. There's supposed to be more birds than humans in this alternate universe. They basically help spread the disease all over the place.

The fourth wave was a little different. We find out that the aliens who they refer to as "the others" can disguise themselves as fellow humans. So this pretty much brings up a huge panic among everyone. Paranoia starts to run rampant and you don't know who you can trust.

In this movie the main character is a girl named Cassie, played by Chloe Grace Moretz. She lived a typical teenage girl life until the invasion of the others. Her mother had passed away from the avian flu. Her father had died in a paranoid shootout within a townhall meeting with all the adults.

For the most part this movie kind of works. There are just so many odd things that are pretty unbelievable. When the first wave hits you see planes just dropping straight down as if electricity was holding the planes in the sky. That's not how planes work. I'm not a physics professor but even I know that's not how planes fall to the ground.

There's also a scene where the military comes to the survival base to round up the kids. It seems odd that nobody understands something is up if the military has working cars and electronics and nobody else does.

It's a very obvious ploy to create a brand new young adult adventure franchise much like the Hunger Games. With a little more finessing of the story I think it could work. There are just so many convenient things that happen to either get rid of adults or people acting as if they're all mindless morons.

I tried not to think too much about the faults of the story and it became a little more interesting. That is until the love interest came into play. I have to say this relationship aspect of the movie was very heavy handed. It's not even subtle and it's cheesy as ever. You obviously know from the way that they wrote the movie that they wanted some sort of love triangle but I get it. They want this to be appealing to as many people as possible.

They have lots of action and lots of drama. The acting is pretty decent too. I can't really complain about any of the acting. It was done fairly well. It's unfortunate that they really planned this to be a franchise. You can tell they had confidence going into the movie because they kind of end the movie off with a cliffhanger that will probably never be concluded.

Overall, if you're a young adult looking for a end of the world disaster movie I think this movie would be right up your alley. Adults watching this movie will kind of groan through a lot of the movie but if you can shut your brain off for 2 hours you just might enjoy it. I barely enjoyed it and almost forgot too much about it to write a review. I have to give this movie a 5.5 out of 10. It's watchable for a certain demographic. Unfortunately, I'm not part of the demographic they're looking to entertain.