Doomsday Schleppers: THE 5TH WAVE

The 5th Wave is the latest young adult apocalyptic dystopia of the week. It gets its name from the final stage of the most convoluted and absurd alien invasion plot this side of Ed Wood. Wave 1: shutting off the planet’s power. Wave 2: sending tsunamis crashing into every coast. Wave 3: spreading bird flu everywhere. Wave 4: flying drones and sending out snipers. It seems like any one of those waves could’ve been sufficient to take out the entire human race, but these unseen alien beings either haven’t planned well or are deliberately toying with us. Or maybe they just like echoing Biblical plagues. Who am I to say? The movie tears through these initial waves, any one of which could be an entire disaster movie, with such quickly paced table-setting glossiness that it forgets to find the impact. It’s in a rush to get to the 5th wave: convincing the surviving humans to lose hope and do themselves in.

Per subgenre dictates, we start with a normal teenager, this time a pretty blonde high school senior (Chloe Grace Moretz). Then, soon enough, generic sci-fi elements clear the way for a scenario in which adults are either powerless or domineering and only teenagers can save the day. If you think this sounds like any number of post-Hunger Games knockoffs, you’re right. This one starts with a smidge of interesting thought, transmogrifying senioritis’ valedictory lap finality into an end-of-the-world metaphor, and then quickly descends into popcorn nihilism and cotton candy platitudes. It’s unusually violent for this sort of tween thing – rampant gun brandishing, bloodless sprays of bullets, and roiling catastrophes, as well as gooey close-up impromptu surgeries. And, though its story goes down some moderately weird side roads on the way to predictable beats, it all too rarely comes to life.

Moretz, despite being very good in a variety of roles (from Carrie to Clouds of Sils Maria) and the star driving this vehicle, is shunted to the side for a good portion of the film. Separated from her father (Ron Livingston) and searching for her little brother (Zackary Arthur), she ends up recuperating in a farmhouse after a mysterious hunk (Alex Roe) rescues her. It’s instant romantic tension. Meanwhile, her brother is stuck in a military compound where Liev Schreiber and Maria Bello are training kids to combat the aliens who have begun latching themselves onto human hosts, Body Snatchers style. At this boot camp we find adorable moppets wielding military-grade firearms and enduring war movie montages. A few older kids are there, too, including It Follows’ Maika Monroe, stealing ever scene she’s in with rebellious charisma, Jurassic World’s Nick Robinson as a mopey hero, and Grand Budapest Hotel’s Tony Revolori as a guy nicknamed Dumbo. Imagine Nicholas Sparks rewrote They Live as a Maze Runner prequel (no politics, more forced sentiment and jumbled mythology) and you’re on the right track. So, yeah, it’s a little weirder than I’d expected.

It’s almost admirably unexpected in the way director J Blakeson (The Disappearance of Alice Creed), from a screenplay adapted from Rick Yancey’s book by Susannah Grant (In Her Shoes), Akiva Goldsman (Insurgent), and Jeff Pinkner (The Amazing Spider-Man 2), ghoulishly churns through large scale (and only partially convincing) calamities to get to the smallest possible scenes where two young people stare at each other in the woods. It discards the waves of alien threats for close moments between teens stuck in the wilderness, or isolated in a child soldier factory. That could be an intriguing small look at a bigger picture, but is instead an uninvolving and weightless perspective. The immediate stakes are so simple – brother and sister need to be reunited – and the larger stakes – saving the planet – are written off as impossible. What a strange mix of brutal conditions and mushy execution, harsh bruising nastiness and gushing sentiment. Overly clean and bright photography throws its artificiality and small thinking into dull obviousness.

That’s what’s ultimately so unsatisfying about The 5th Wave. It strands a good cast in a movie that could’ve really popped with evocative metaphor and a harrowing concept, but fails to really reckon with the implications of its premise, glossing over moral dilemmas. Sure, it features our lead killing an innocent man (we see the same moment twice, even) and a twist that complicates easy morality, but these ideas remain half-buried in the slick formula. Heavy ideas, up to and including the end of the world and the deaths (or potential thereof) of everyone they love, are merely used for superficial weight holding down the edges of a premise so flimsy it threatens to blow away right before our very eyes. By the ending, which resolves the immediate conflicts through convenient luck, then coasts to a limp cliffhanger, I nearly forgot why I had bothered to care in the first place.

Endless Love: WINTER'S TALE

Winter’s Tale is a movie that’s big, open, and earnestly sentimental in a way that films rarely are. It’s also so very bad that it’s enough to make you wish movies were big, open, and earnestly sentimental a little less. Based on a novel by Mark Helprin, it is written, directed, and produced as a passion project by screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, who in his career has had a hand in glossy studio schlock of one kind (A Beautiful Mind) or another (Batman & Robin). Here he brings all the tools of industry to a film that’s nothing more than self-satisfied hogwash, supremely dopey in its story about a scrappy New York thief (Colin Farrell) who falls in love with a beautifully sickly girl (Jessica Brown Findlay) and has an enemy in a demon (Russell Crowe) who petitions Lucifer (Will Smith) to let him squash the couple. Or something like that. As the drippy voice over that starts and ends this mess says, the story postulates that the universe bends over backwards to help each and every person fulfill their Destiny, find True Love, perform Miracles, and other types of capital-letter cornball metaphysical hooey.

Yes, you read that right. It says every person gets to experience this, but, the film stipulates, only the very luckiest among us get the chance to glimpse our lives’ patterns in their fullest and most twinkling expression. In this case, Farrell loves Findlay so intensely that after she dies the bounds of mortality are slipped free, but only for him. He wanders New York City for 100 years with no memory of his past , waiting for his True Purpose to be reawakened, and to perform his one great miracle and be turned into a star and placed in the heavens forever next to his beloved. We don’t get to see more than a time-lapse montage of the skyline changing to signify the passing of years. One minute it’s 1915 or thereabouts, then here we are in 2014 and a memory-less Farrell spends his days drawing with chalk in public spaces and bumps into Jennifer Connelly and, later, Eva Marie Saint. It’s all for a Reason. It’s all trembling with Importance. It’s all so very satisfied in its coincidences and insistence that everything happens for a reason. I don’t know. I think I’d rather life be cold, empty, and meaningless than have it mean any of this.

Oh, and did I mention that there’s a magical horse that appears and helps Farrell out of a jam now and again, sprouts ethereal wings whenever convenient, and might be an earthly manifestation of the Pegasus constellation? It’s the kind of movie so convolutedly confusing in its inanities that to describe it makes one seem to be devolving into a raging lunatic. On the one hand it’s dealing with complicated and almost entirely unexplained fantasy rules of treaties between angels and demons and Crowe has to ask Will Smith’s goofily creepy Devil to bend the rules and stop a miracle in progress or something. On the other hand, the whole thing is motivated by a kind of pseudo-spiritual romantic martyrdom so feverish and swooning that it’d probably make Nicholas Sparks cringe. It starts with Farrell entering the life of the girl who grows more beautiful as she nears her death from consumption as her worried father (William Hurt) frets. It ends with a child dying of cancer as Connelly worries close by. Consumption and cancer makes for quite a heavy pairing to be treated so twinklingly in a film that shoots for magical realism and arrives somewhere much closer to magical thinking.

Confused in the details and dunderheaded in the grand sweep, Winter’s Tale is a misfire on all levels. Cinematographer Caleb Deschanel somehow manages to make every shot look like it’s taking place inside a knockoff Thomas Kinkade painting, too-perfect snow and glowing hearths underneath a lens flaring night sky. The screenplay is stuffed with syrupy hippie dippie dialogue that’s at once overwritten and overtly simple. No prop – be it a bed, a flower, a plaque, a drawing – goes without immediate transformation into broad Symbolic Importance. It all works to anesthetize a cast of usually compelling performers. It might’ve been easier to take if even one relationship was something more than irredeemably unbelievable. It’s not easy to make William Hurt, Eva Marie Saint, Jennifer Connelly, Will Smith, Jessica Brown Findlay, Russell Crowe, and Colin Farrell all complete nothings, communicating not a single moment of emotion or interest amongst them. With an ensemble like that, you could and should be well on your way to a terrific movie. Instead, in its endless slog through soggy sentimentality, self-important stupidity, and blatantly thematically schematic design, it grows interminable. It can’t even scrape up some unfortunate campiness. It’s just awful through and through. 

Angels & Demons (2009)

There’s an entertaining thriller somewhere within Angels & Demons, but it’s hidden behind a creaky pace. Tom Hanks is back, looking unusually exhausted and once again without his charisma, as Robert Langdon, the Harvard symbologist (ha!) who cracked the DaVinci Code. This time he has to stop a plot to destroy the Vatican. The movie is helped by the presence of a literal ticking-bomb scenario but why, then, does everything seem to happen at such a sleepy rate? The movie is intermittently thrilling but never really involving or frightening. By the time the movie turns splendidly pulpy in the last act, it’s too late.

There’s a solid cast of supporting characters. If there's one sure way to liven up a dull B-movie, it has to be: hire European character actors. Ewan McGregor and Armin Mueller-Stahl play officials of the Catholic Church who billow through the ornate cathedrals and archways with a grand sense of purpose and grave portentousness. Stellan Skarsgard is also on hand to huff and puff as head of security and Ayelet Zurer - as a bioentanglement physicist (double ha!) - gets to stand in the background of many scenes (sometimes she even gets to say something). On the whole, this movie is less ponderous and pretentious than DaVinci Code, which leads me to assume that director Ron Howard realized that, despite the high gross, all the people who found the first film a little on the stuffy side were correct. But Mr. Howard has not swung far enough the other way. This time, instead of quietly murmuring monologues of pseudo-historical hogwash, the characters shout it or gasp it while racing through Rome but it’s just as repetitive as the first film. “Blah blah blah cathedral! Blah blah blah statue!” Repeat. The film also helpfully reminds us of major plot points regularly, for the convenience of those who have nodded off between murders.

Speaking of murders, the movie manages to be quite bloodthirsty and the MPAA ratings board has had no qualms about giving the film a PG-13 despite lingering upon brandings, rats gnawing a fresh corpse, one bloody slit throat, and, oh yes, a delightful scene in which a man with a chest wound is given CPR that causes a spurt of blood to soak the face of our hero. And yet Slumdog Millionaire received an R? It would be one thing if the carnage here served a fun, fast plot but it's merely a sad attempt to liven up some dusty proceedings.

In the face of all that brutality, it’s a shock to find that the movie goes soft in other aspects. There’s a legitimate conversation to be had about the respective roles that science and religion play in modern life, and perhaps a summer blockbuster is not the appropriate place to have it, but this movie pays lip service to grander ideas, uses them to fuel its plot, but is never honest about the conflict or lack thereof. I can understand not taking sides so as not to offend any member of the audience, but Ron Howard, and his writers David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman, downplay both sides to such an extent that a member of the audience could be forgiven for assuming that neither side has any point at all. Though such intellectual dishonesty has long marred all movies focus-grouped beyond the point of making any statements about anything, it’s rare to stumble upon one that, if thought through, has the capacity to make one question the basic meaning of life. If both science and faith are wrong, where does that leave us? It’s a good thing that no one goes to these kinds of movies looking for answers to life’s big questions (I hope).

Grotesqueries and hypocrisies aside, the movie manages several scenes of competent thrills and spills amongst some gorgeous production design. Mostly taking place at nightfall, the characters run and stalk through settings choked with atmosphere: cobwebbed caverns and shadowy passageways with dramatic lighting (and dramatic camerawork) accentuate the beautiful architecture of the city. The plot is appropriately twisty and the last act, as previously hinted, goes pleasantly insane with some last minute twists, some Vatican backstabbing and skullduggery, an act of self-martyrdom, and one very large explosion. It’s too bad it takes so long to get there. There’s a fun summer movie to be had at times, and if you’re forced to see it, there are certainly worse ways to spend two conspiracy-minded hours (see, or rather, don't: National Treasure or The DaVinci Code). I just wish someone had been let into the editing room to shave thirty to forty minutes off this thing to make it sail past its tepid attempts to tackle serious topics and get us even faster to the fun.