It is at this point that Yancey’s saga begins to seem very, very similar to other stories about alien invasions. In the minds of these aliens, in other words, there is no reason to bother with trivial menaces like another global earthquake or another lethal disease when they can now deploy the ultimate, unstoppable force, a well-trained twelve-year-old.
THE 5TH WAVE GAME FULL
Yes, that is Yancey’s story (though describing it in full requires a mild “spoiler”): as heroine Cassie Sullivan (Chloë Grace Moretz) struggles to stay alive in her devastated world, aliens pretending to be human soldiers recruit her kid brother Sam (Zackary Arthur), her heartthrob Ben Parish (Nick Robinson), and other youths and send them through basic training so that, imagining they are killing aliens, they can be sent out to shoot down any humans who managed to live through the pulse, earthquake, plague, and alien snipers. Finally, as their final and utterly devastating “5th Wave,” the aliens turn to the most terrifying weapon that humans could possibly imagine: their own children.
Yancey’s answer is ingenious and revelatory: his aliens begin their assault by disabling all of Earth’s technology with an electromagnetic pulse they then trigger a massive earthquake that floods the world’s coastal cities they unleash a deadly virus that, in the novel at least, kills all but a handful of Earth’s people and they unveil an army of human quislings, secretly implanted long ago with a controlling alien intelligence, to begin slaughtering the survivors. But how might an author shoehorn the Collins-Dashner-Roth formula into a story about an alien attack? It is hard to imagine aliens who would only target young people, or aliens who would forge an alliance with human adults to terrorize young people.
Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) and still thriving today, as evidenced by this film and another one on my 2016 list, Independence Day: Resurgence. So this film is also part of a long tradition of novels and films about alien invasions, dating back to H.
THE 5TH WAVE GAME SERIES
The obvious innovation is that whereas the other series featured human adults in charge of repressive regimes as the villains, The 5th Wave involves sinister aliens who are seeking to conquer the Earth (though all the aliens we see happen to look like human adults). As I consider The 5th Wave, therefore, the only logical strategy is to focus on what is different about Yancey’s approach to this lucrative genre. For there is only so much one can say about films that relentlessly celebrate the unalloyed wonderfulness of young people and reprehensible perfidy of adults (with some rare exceptions), and in my last examination of such a film, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (2015), I fear that I was beginning to run out of things to say (so I will decline to provide the link, though I can’t prevent you from searching for that review, or the other six that fall into this category). Though the film series launched with Divergent in 2014 somehow escaped my attention, I have been dutifully watching and reviewing all adaptations of the other listed texts, and confronting a year that is not offering an over-abundance of meritorious science fiction films, I reluctantly selected The 5th Wave to complete my quota of 2016 reviews. Now, having begun his own as-yet-incomplete trilogy with The 5th Wave (2013), Rick Yancey is stepping forward to claim his piece of the pie. As I argued in a previous review, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985) provided an early model for these stories then came Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy (2008-2010), James Dashner’s Maze Runner tetralogy (2009-2012), and Veronica Roth’s Divergent trilogy (2011-2013). It seems to be the new pattern for Hollywood success: write a young adult novel about an apocalyptic future society wherein likable teenagers are oppressed by evil adults, ostensibly for some noble purpose stretch the story out into (at least) a trilogy sell the rights to film producers anxious to exploit a pre-sold property, designed to appeal to a coveted target audience, that requires no expensive stars and achieve fame and fortune from the resulting three (or four) popular movies based on your work.
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