The aliens, called the Others, are the villains, yet they’re never personified in any way to directly threaten the hero.
What makes “The 5th Wave” so unsatisfying as a movie is the villain. When the hero’s mother dies, we’re supposed to feel sad at the loss, but we briefly saw the mother in one scene before she’s dead in the next, so it’s hard to care about her at all. Most likely the movie was simply following the book too closely, but from a cinematic point of view, what’s the point of introducing the hero’s best friend if she never plays a part in the rest of the story? The hero’s mother dies and the hero sees her best friend briefly in quarantine and you never see the hero’s best friend again. Visually it’s interesting but from a story perspective, you have to ask why bother showing this when it has nothing to do with the main story, which is about a 16-year old girl in Ohio trying to survive? “The 5th Wave” spends most of Act I simply showing us one disaster after another with characters who pop up briefly, never to be seen again. Watching a parade of disasters strike is ultimately boring because how exciting can it be to watch a tidal wave blow apart the Tower Bridge in London? To show the effects of each wave, we get to see short snippets of the disaster from tidal waves hitting coastal cities to people being quarantined and dying. The premise is interesting, but the presentation of that initial premise is boring. The basic story is that aliens have invaded the Earth and have decimated the world’s population in multiple waves where each wave is a different type of attack ranging from electromagnetic pulses to knock out machines to earthquakes, flash floods, and diseases. That’s the huge problem with the beginning of “The 5th Wave.” Many novels and stage plays translate poorly into movies because the movie too closely follows the original source material, which makes for a dull visual story. If you haven’t read the book, you can truly study “The 5th Wave” from a cinematic point of view. So besides watching good movies to inspire you, watch bad movies to see what not to do as a screenwriter. One of the latest poorly reviewed films is “The 5th Wave.” Let’s dissect what made this movie so bad when the book was received so well. You can learn anything by watching something done right and studying the exact same thing done wrong.