Along the way, she’s shot by a mysterious sniper on a highway clogged with derelict vehicles (shades of “The Walking Dead,” which shares with the film Georgia locations and more than a little visual iconography). Showing up at a refugee camp in the woods, Cassie, Sam and Oliver are just in time for the arrival of Vosch (Liev Schreiber), a take-charge military colonel who orders the children bused to Wright Patterson Air Force Base and the adults to the camp meeting hall. What happens next is chaotic but necessarily inevitable, leaving Cassie alone and on the run with a scavenged M-16 and a determination to rescue Sam from the base. The first wave is an electromagnetic pulse that darkens the planet the second wave consists of massive tsunamis and thunderous earthquakes the third wave decimates most of the survivors via a deadly virus that claims Cassie’ mother, Lisa (Maggie Siff), but to which some remain immune the fourth wave reveals that selected humans, dubbed Silencers, are actually Others intent on hunting down the hardy few who’ve scattered to the wind and the fifth wave is, well, the final two-thirds of the film. Though its occupants, dubbed “the Others,” are silent and unseen, they soon make their intentions clear by mounting a series of offensives. In the present day, Ohio teenager Cassie Sullivan ( Chloe Grace Moretz) does what modern young people do: drink beer at unsupervised house parties, moon over boys - in this case, oblivious high-school football heartthrob Ben Parish (Nick Robinson) - dote on her little brother Sam (Zackary Arthur), and banter with her laid-back father, Oliver (Ron Livingston).īut Cassie’s cozy suburban cocoon is soon shattered by the arrival of a massive alien ship coincidentally floating just above their street. Still, the film will ride the inevitable wave of fandom and newcomers alike to moderate box office and a healthy afterlife, allowing producers Tobey Maguire and Graham King to move forward with production of the other two books in the author’s proposed trilogy, “The Infinite Sea” (2014) and “The Last Star,” to be published later this year.Įnough of Yancey’s ambitious narrative has made the final cut to reflect an arrestingly original spin on trendy genre tropes.

Yet the multitudinous devotees of Rick Yancey’s wildly successful 2013 novel may have more issues with what has been edited or left out entirely than with what’s survived the transition. Taken on its own, “The 5th Wave” is an effectively decent post-apocalyptic, young-adult, world-in-the-balance survival thriller.

Evan shooting cassie the 5th wave