The next wave in young adult science fiction

Based on a novel by Rick Yancy – the first in a trilogy, with the third due out this year – “The 5th Wave” centres on a teen heroine who has survived four apocalyptic waves of an alien invasion. She needs to find her little brother before he becomes a weapon in the fifth.
The film is testing the waters outside of North America before its release there next week.
“I’ve done action since I was 11 years old,” the now-18 Moretz tells The Plymouth Herald. “Action is my second hand. It’s super fun and easy for me, and it’s exciting to see fighting done in close quarters.”
Her tough “5th Wave” character, Cassie, is not just a another Katniss Everden from “The Hunger Games”, she tells The National in the United Arab Emirates.
“The reason I actually chose this project is that in the past I’d been offered a few different roles in the kind of franchises we’ve seen and I never saw any reason to make them into movies or why those characters needed to be portrayed on screen, so I didn’t do it,” she says. “But Sony sent this book over and I found it isn’t a traditional [young adult] novel, in the sense that it doesn’t deal with the YA-essential themes of dystopian world, girl plucked out of obscurity to take over and fight for everyone’s rights – and there was no major love triangle.”
However, the same newspaper’s film critic decried the film’s lack of originality, calling it “alien-invasion-by-the-numbers”.
Syndey Morning Herald writer Philippa Hawker was kinder in her three-star review, stating that the “‘teens survive invasion/save the world narrative’ has become a regular fixture on the movie calendar”, so, basically, might has well accept it, sit back and enjoy.

Also opening

The Friese-Greene Club –Tonight, cue the banjo music for a relaxing canoe trip with Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox in “Deliverance”, part of a month-long tribute to the late cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond. And tomorrow, it’s a Paul Thomas Anderson film, his “documentary” on the “golden age of porn”, “Boogie Nights”. Other entries are “Roman Holiday” on Sunday and “Il Postino” on Wednesday. Shows are at 8pm. For more details, check FGC.in.th.

German Open Air Cinema – A young computer whiz joins masked hackers who stage increasingly daring raids on corporations and the government in “Who Am I – No System Is Safe”. Baran bo Odar directs, tossing in “Fight Club” references. The show is at 7.30pm on Tuesday at the Goethe-Institut on Sathorn Soi 1.

Alliance Francaise – There’s a children’s matinee at 2pm tomorrow with the animated “Gus – Petit oiseau, grand voyage”, aka “Yellowbird”. Featured at last year’s World Film Festival of Bangkok, it’s about an unusual orphaned yellow bird who becomes the unlikely leader of a mass migration. The usual 7pm Wednesday screening is “Seraphine”, an award-winning 2008 historical drama about painter S้raphine Louis. For details, check AFThailande.org.