Soccer practice is interrupted by buzzing phones alerting the kids and coaches to the giant ships in the sky. The Cassie who kills.”įor its first half-hour or so, The 5th Wave admirably conveys the contrast between the warm, nostalgic light of Cassie’s innocence and the absurdist catastrophes that befell her and humanity. “I wonder what that Cassie would think of me now. That’s a hell of a thing, starting your movie with your fresh-faced teenage heroine killing an innocent, wounded man. When we first see Cassie in the film (before she flashes back to life as it was), she kills a bleeding man who seems to be reaching for a gun it turns out to be a cross. Then the power went out, tidal waves wiped out half of humanity, and bird flu took care of the rest. Cassie, as she makes clear in The 5th Wave’s opening narration, was a middle-class high-schooler, playing soccer and going to parties and texting with her BFF and lusting secretly after hunky football players before the mysterious giant alien ships started hovering above Earth. That “pumpkin” makes the line ridiculous, but it’s also the word that sells the overall conceit of a seeming lyordinary girl’s life being transformed forever.Ī lot of YA stories focus on characters who were outcasts or outsiders to begin with (Katniss in The Hunger Games being a prime example).
It’s a movie not just about losing one’s innocence (that’s what all YA books and movies are about these days) but about soft centers and hard shells - about the cute colliding with the cruel. “Pumpkin, there’s nothing safe anymore.” That’s what calmly downcast Oliver Sullivan (Ron Livingston) tells his teenage daughter, Cassie (Chloë Grace Moretz), partway through the new young-adult dystopian sci-fi The 5th Wave, and it’s a good example of the kind of very thin, deadly line the film tries to walk.