The 5th Wave (2016)

Gigantic alien crafts appear in Earth's skies, a bit like in Independence Day and the planet and human race becomes subjected to ever increasing waves of destruction until it is time for the 5th... This film starts off with the heroine, a teenage girl called Cassie, narrating the story, so it's clearly one of those movies aimed at a younger audience. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact there is a fair amount of horror and violence to be found. The issue of loss and separation of loved ones is dealt with when first Cassie's mother dies from the infection wave. Then her Dad is killed in cold blood, and at the same time she and her younger brother get separated. All quite sad. The military, the "saviours," turn out to be, predictably, "others", the name given to the alien invaders, who can adopt human guise. When they massacre all of the adults at a refuge camp that was chillingly real in as far as genocide is sadly one of humanities greatest crimes. However where it gets silly is having the army (actually "others") train kids and turn them into military units in order to be tricked into killing off human survivors! Can't the aliens just do that themselves? There's a love interest, teen girl meets buff boy, etc, as to be expected.. Acting and effects are all reasonably good. While this film is certainly no SF classic I found it to be reasonably enjoyable hour and a half.

Contains spoilers. I have seen a few clips from this film on Youtube and thought it might be interesting, so, when I found it in a bargain bin yesterday, going for next to nothing, I paid the paltry few dollars and brought it home.I played it last night and reached the end of the miserable thing wishing that I had left it in the bin and used the paltry few dollars to buy something useful, like liquorice allsorts. You get what you pay for, I guess.Just about every teen flick/post-apocalyptic/alien invasion/wrong-guys-are-the-bad-guys cliché has been recycled in this mind-numbingly vapid waste of 108 minutes of my life. The heroine, Cassie, stumbles from one life-threatening moment to the next and barely gets her hair mussed or face dirty - by halfway through the film I was starting to get sick of close-ups of her perfectly clean, pretty face.I actually started to get twitchy early on in the film, but nearly reached breaking point when the military massacred the adults in the gunfight at the survivours camp and departed, leaving their own dead behind - and their weapons! In light of later revelations, the apparently callous abandonment of their own casualties could be explained, but no military walks off leaving behind weapons than could later be used against them.Expecting a viewer to accept that small children could, in only a few weeks, be turned into combat soldiers, was pushing things a bit far, but it has apparently worked in parts of Africa, so why not the USA too? But then those same children were sent into battle at night, wearing lights on their helmets! Why not just give each a bullhorn so that she/he could stand out in the open and shout at the enemy, "Here I am! Here I am!"The final nail in the coffin for this awful film was expecting the viewer to believe that one man could carry enough explosives to blow an entire airfield and its buildings into a huge hole in the ground. By then, thank the Lords of Kobol, there were only a few minutes left in this film, so I sweated it out to the end and vowed never to watch it again.I have two teenage granddaughters who like lightweight films, but they wouldn't be able to stomach even this.This film gets two stars from me, and lucky to get even that.

If you know the book trilogy, of which this is just the first book, then you know the secret of the alien "others." It could have been revealed in this movie, but then the movie would never have been made. The "Others" are rabid environmentalists, going around the universe to different planets killing off the top-dog species on each planet on the assumption that the top species is a danger to all the others. So that is their motive to exterminating the human race. But you can't have "good" environmentalists as "bad" aliens without a lot of thinking, which this movie doesn't have.

The book may have been stupid - but at least it was well written. The reason why this story is unique is because it is so mindbogglingly stupid that no one would actually put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard to share it with other people. This movie could've been fun if it was self-aware. The problem is that it takes itself way too seriously. It takes a dumb idea and tried prestent it as genius. The Plot - I don't want to put in any spoilers, but this plot is stupid and convoluted. Its kinda fun in the book because its presented well, but in the movie, its even dumber. All I would have to do to get you saying "wtf" is describe the plot. Its really dumb. The Acting - All of the acting is terrible. While watching this, I both laughed and I cringed. The child actors have terrible direction and no talent. If I was a child in this movie, and looked back at my performance in this nonsense, I'd try to avoid every being recognized in it. Its so bad. I feel bad for a lot of the people who were involved in this money grab.Effects - The cinematography and the special effects are all terrible. This movie looks really cheap. The whole look of it is very bad. Action - The action is really bad. I could go on, but really it would be more of the same. Everything about this movie is really cheap and bad. Its not worth watching. I wish this movie was more self-aware about how dumb it is. Then we could've had a fun dumb action movie. Instead we got 2 hours of pretentious nonsense.