The 5th Wave (2016)

The 5th Wave finds a way to make the most of Moretz’s talents, with the emotionality she showed in If I Stay and the utter physical chutzpah of her Kick-Ass films.

The frankly preposterous nature of the film’s setup is rendered slightly less so by a couple of second act reveals. But, by then, many viewers will have lost interest in a movie with a very high bodycount but a very small amount of grit, either emotional or literal.

Enough of Yancey’s ambitious narrative has made the final cut to reflect an arrestingly original spin on trendy genre tropes.

Director J Blakeson...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 year’s Goldsman-penned Insurgent.

Moretz strikes a convincing empowered-badass pose but has no amount of charismatic fearsomeness can energize the illogical latter portions of The 5th Wave, which are driven by revelations about the aliens that, to put it bluntly, make no sense.