THE 5TH WAVE

Reviewed by Patrick Gibbs         

Starring Chloe Grace Moretz, Nick Robinson, Live Schreiber, Alex Roe, Ron Livingston, Maika Monroe and Maria Bello
Based on the novel by Rick Yancey
Screenplay by Susanna Grant, Akiva Goldsman and Jeff Pinkner
Directed by J Blakeson


Leonardo DaVinci foresaw manned flight. Orson Scott Card foresaw the internet. But there are some things about the future that no one can predict, no matter how much foresight they possess, and the post apocalyptic teeny bopper genre is most certainly one of those things.

For all of its many detractors (and I count myself as one) the success of the Twilight saga showed the entertainment world that there was an audience desperately crying out for stories centered around young female protagonists, and as such, it has actually had a very positive effect. The Hunger Games franchise was so far above the aforementioned title in terms of a compelling story and characters that it crossed over into appealing to many adults, and it has changed the popular notion of what a story for girls is supposed to be. You may be tired of these kinds of movies. The latest installment of the Detergent series may not interest you, but there is a large group that not only wants this, but needs to be represented. So, as badly done, backward and backhandedly sexist as Twilight most certainly was, I still applaud what it has done for a generation.

Unfortunately, as is always the case, the message that creators of popular fiction have taken from this is just as much that churning out variations on the same old thing tailored to fit the current trend means an easy return on your investment as that girls are people, too. Whether it's callous but stylish wise-cracking hitmen or teenage girls facing down the end of the world, it's always easier to just copy than it is to create. The 5th Wave is he latest movie trying to cash in, and to say that it is nothing more than War of the Worlds in a training bra is frankly being too kind.

Cassie (Chloe Grace Moretz) is a regular teenage girl with regular dreams, which she dutifully jots down in a diary, according to the Hollywood teenage girl handbook. She is also a cheerleader, and she has a crush on a football player.  But her entire world (not to mention everyone else's) is drastically changed by the arrival of  "The Others," which is the name that mankind gives to the inhabitants of mysterious spacecraft that appear around the world, hovering over cities and suburban neighborhoods, but not attempting to make contact, making everyone over 20 in the audience suddenly want to watch Independence Day. But of course, when "The Others" do make contact, they do it in the form of wanton mayhem and destruction in an attempt to exterminate the human race, because they too have a Hollywood handbook to follow.

Cassie and her father and brother Sammy end up in a military facility for survivors  (I honestly can't remember what happened to Mom, or if she eve existed, it was so hard to care.). It is there that they are informed that these invaders can take human form, and may be amongst them now ("Wait! You're saying that some of us are others?" a featured extra spouts, in what is likely to be the most unintentionally amusing line of the year.).

When news arrives that the base is under attack, the children are loaded onto buses to be taken to safety first. But Sammy forgets his Teddy Bear, so his dutiful older sister must go retrieve it. But of course, the buses leave without her, so when the adults are all gone, she must make it on her own.

From here, we follow dual storylines as Cassie tries to make it to her brother, meeting a mysterious yet ruggedly handsome young stranger (surprise) along the way, and her brother ends up training to be a soldier alongside her secret crush the football player (played by Jurassic World's Nick Robinson). The two plotlines compete to see which one can be more predictable and insipid, but Cassie's plot wins out in the end, which is an impressive accomplishment considering the Blackhawk Down Goes To Middle School sequence. I find it both fascinating and indescribably disturbing that so much of our popular fiction is based on the premise of kids being handed a gun and made into soldiers, forced to grow up immediately as they face kill or be killed situations, and yet no one bothers to see Beasts of No Nation, the most shameful Oscar snub of 2015. Is anyone else bothered by the fact that children being forced to kill is endlessly interesting to us as a fictional "what if?" science fiction scenario as long as they are white and American, but if they are not, and it's happening right now, nobody cares??? If I'm really the only one, then to quote Lucy Van Pelt, "Stop the world, I want to get off."

But back to the topic at hand: this particular movie is boring, poorly paced, and woefully predictable. The largely capable cast does their best with the material, but the immensely talented Moretz, who has given truly great performances in films ranging from Hugo to Kick Ass to The Equalizer that the fact that she could and should be doing better seems evident even to her, and her performance seems half hearted.  Robinson fares much better, and provides the only moments of the film where I started to care about any of these characters as if they were people. As usual, Liev Schreiber is wasted in a thankless role, and Mario Bello seems to be going for "first Razzie candidate of the year" in a small role as a Southern Fried Military woman.

In the end, this isn't quite bad enough to be interesting as a failure, but it's nowhere near good enough for any complimentary word higher than "watchable." If it reaches an audience, it will only be further testament to how badly the long underrepresented female young adult audience wants movies aimed at them, and to our responsibility to make better ones so that they we make sure that they are truly being represented and not just exploited with this new pop culture trend.

THE REVENANT

Reviewed by Patrick Gibbs


Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson, Will Poulter
Screenplay by Mark L. Smith and Alejandro G. Innaritu
Directed by
Alejandro G. Innaritu

Rated R (Violence, gory images, a sexual assault, and profanity)

Oscar Winner Alejandro G. Innaratu's 19th century story of survival has received a lot of press and a lot of hype, including an extremely bizarre controversy that spread over the Internet, when it was falsely reported that Leonardo Dicaprio's character is raped by a bear on screen (the studio quickly issued a statement to clarify this ridiculous assertion.). It may be the second most talked about film of the holiday movie season, surpassed only by Star Wars: The Force Awakens.  So, with all of this talk, the big questions are simple: is is really as violent as you've heard? And is it good enough to justify that violence?

The answers are: "yes and no," and "almost." It's every bit as brutal and shocking as all that, but it's not the callous, bloodthirsty, devoid of any moral compass, Tarantino style revenge story that you might be expecting. What is being unflinchingly portrayed here  is the brutality of the conflict between white frontiersmen exploring and sometimes pillaging what is, to them, a new land, and the Native Americans who call it home. Even more so, it's a harsh portrayal of man's desperate determination in surviving against the elements of nature. The often very graphic depictions are essential to the story, and most of it doesn't feel as gratuitous as it easily could have, but the question "Did I really need to see that happening?" is going to vary wildly from viewer to viewer.

Hugh Glass (DiCaprio) is a frontiersman and trapper guiding a quasi-military group of hunters and fur trappers through the Louisiana purchase territory in 1823.  His half Pawnee son, Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) is with him on the journey, and Glass keeps him close, especially after the group is ambushed by Arikara indians, leaving half of the party dead. Captain Henry (Gleeson) the leader, knows he they are being pursued, and that tensions among the men are high. Things are further complicated when Glass is viciously attacked by a bear trying to protect her cubs and is nearly mauled to death.

Glass is cared for as best as Henry can facilitate, but dragging a nearly dead man through the mountains and snow is significantly slowing down the party, who need to get back to the safety of the Fort before the Arikara find them. One of the men, Fitzgerald (Hardy) pleads a case for putting Glass out of his misery for his sake and theirs, but the Captain can't bring himself to do it. He offers a sizable cash reward anyone who will stay with Glass and care for him until he passes, and perform a proper burial when the time comes. When Hawk and another young man, Bridger (Will Coulter) offer to forfeit their shares to whoever will stay with them, Fitzgerald surprisingly volunteers on the grounds that he needs to make up for his losses on the expedition.

Of course, things only get worse from there, and a series of events leads up to Glass being left alone to die, as by all standards of sense he should. But Glass simply refuses to give up.

The story of Hugh Glass has been told and retold for over a century, and the dramatic embellishments added over the years are considered by historians to trace back to Glass himself. So on the one hand, once you read up on this and discover that most real life accounts are not as horrific and violent as the film portrays, that Glass's son Hawk is a creature of fiction, and that the final confrontation with Fitzgerald (whose real name was William Fitzpatrick) ended very differently, you start to question just how much of the unflinching brutality should be praised and how much of it should be criticized. But 20 years after Braveheart cleaned up at the Oscars, this is hardly anything new to Hollywood. This is an extremely compelling and vivid retelling of the Glass story, and history and legend are both timeless and timely, being told through the mouth of the storytellers of the day.

Innaritu is a remarkable storyteller, and his seeming control of every detail his camera captures is really unsurpassed by anyone. The "how did they do that?" factor to this movie is nothing short of staggering.  But if you're hoping to find a redemptive, inspiring element, it's not to be found. Instead, Innaritu juxtaposes the idea of what we will do to stay alive vs. what, if anything, we are ultimately living for, and the sad reality that finding the answer to the latter question can be more brutal than the fight to survive. As we see Glass's dead son live in flashbacks and dreams, as well as his interactions with and fierce protection of young Hawk, we discover that Glass and the bear are kindred spirits, and that realization is more than a bit haunting.

The movie does tend to meander a bit at times, and runs a bit too long. It's important not to rush Glass's self-recovery and perilous journey, but there are moments when it does start to drag a bit. In a particular, an extended sequence when he is happened upon by a lone Pawnee who helps nurse him back to health started to make me feel like I was watching an attempted reboot of The Lone Ranger, and probably could have been cut entirely.

But it's hard to fault a movie too much for aiming so high, and this is as skilled a piece of filmmaking as any in 2015, or in recent memory. The cast delivers all around, though there seems to be a deliberate (and wise) choice not to truly let us into anyone's head. Each character is an enigma, and we are never entirely sure what is going inside, or who they were before they ended up on this hellish predicament.

DiCaprio, the perennial Oscar hopeful, is obviously the one getting all of the attention (and he should be getting some for his pained, brooding performance that actually becomes more human and low key the further Glass has to descend into an animalistic world), but the most compelling characterizations actually come from Hardy, Gleeson and especially young Poulter, whose combination of wide eyed fear, staunch bravery, and ultimately self loathing and sorrow at his own weakness, make his wonderfully human portrayal of the legendary frontiersman Jim Bridger arguably the best part of the film. Hardy is everything we've come to expect him to be: burly, stoic and imposing, with a hard edge that masks the vulnerability inside, and as unlikable as Fitzgerald is, you can't completely dismiss his point of view. Gleeson has a rare ability to fit perfectly into any film, and adds an extremely welcome presence. Emmanuel Lubezki's captivating cinematography is arguably outstanding, and will likely guide him to his third Oscar in a row (and in the process put something of a damper on the current movement toward going back to shooting on film, as his stunning work here on digital catches bold and atmospheric images that burn into the mind's eye.).

On the whole, the movie is a triumph, if not for all tastes.  Innaritu tends to make "mood movies" that will either really work for you or really not, depending on how you go into them, and this is hardly the exception to that. But if you're up for it, there is a lot to admire here.