If part of YAвЂ™s appeal is that it provides a fantasy of independence from parents at a time when young people find it deferred longer than ever, Enrique ChediakвЂ™s glossless digital photography locates The 5th Wave very much in the here and now, investing it with the same earthiness he gave 2014вЂ™s The Maze Runner.With the new year approaching, the highly-anticipated young adult adaptation The 5th Wave is just a few weeks away from release. In a sequence sustained seamlessly by editor Paul Rubell, the kids stick it to the adults and strike out on their own. This middle section of the film is the saggiest, weighed down by a leaden romance that seems all too familiar, but it picks up again when Cassie and Ben team up to rescue Nugget from under the nose of SchreiberвЂ™s conniving Colonel Vosch. He calms her nerves by telling her, вЂњI couldnвЂ™t save my parents, but I could save you.вЂќ Cassie wakes up in EvanвЂ™s farmhouse after having been shot, and is naturally suspicious of her benefactor. ItвЂ™s rare for almost all of a movieвЂ™s clangers to be given to one character, but Roe gets thrown the lot. SheвЂ™s saved from enemy snipers by Evan Walker, a mysterious farm boy played by Alex Roe, a pretty, very earnest English actor in the Robert Pattinson-Theo James tradition.

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 picвЂ™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 вЂњthe others,вЂќ as the aliens are called throughout, can assume human form. SheвЂ™s particularly memorable next to Moretz, who has always made for a convincingly scrappy teenager but is something of a blank slate as the filmвЂ™s heroine, with line readings pitched at a level of panicked desperation that never really varies. TheyвЂ™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 sisterвЂ™s old crush, Ben Parish ( Jurassic WorldвЂ™s Nick Robinson). SheвЂ™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. вЂњNowhere is safe anymore,вЂќ he tells her.Д«efore long, a reliably inscrutable Liev Schreiber rolls in at the head of a phalanx of tanks. They lob in to a nearby campsite turned tent-city, where CassieвЂ™s father gives her a gun. Soon the family is strapping packs to their back and abandoning their house, which seems to be by-the-course in movies like this, though surely it would be most peopleвЂ™s last move. When the bird flu hits, CassieвЂ™s best friend is quarantined at the local football field, never to be heard from again. A montage of computer-generated tidal waves smashing into Miami and the London Bridge and up office stairwells is terrifying and tossed off, as though Blakeson is in a hurry to get the apocalypse out of the way and on with the story. 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 worldвЂ™s power - the first phase. Director J Blakeson (behind the camera for the first time since 2009вЂ™s drum-tight The Disappearance of Alice Creed) might be making franchise bait, but he exhibits a relatively restrained reliance on spectacle, and the screenplay by Jeff Pinkner, Susannah Grant and Akiva Goldsman is light on the aphoristic earnestness that bogged down the most recent Hunger Games, or last yearвЂ™s Goldsman-penned Insurgent. If that sounds tantalizingly like a retread of the sci-fi blockbuster that MoretzвЂ™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. Adapted from Rick YanceyвЂ™s 2013 novel, The 5 th 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.

Cast for the 5th wave