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The 5th Wave: Mini-review

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Chloe Grace Moretz

Chloe Grace Moretz hopes to follow Jennifer Lawrence’s career path

CAudiences watching The 5th Wave can be forgiven if they have a strong feeling of déjà vu. Truth be told, the first half hour of 5th Wave resembles every CGI disaster movie of the last 20 years rolled into one, while the remaining 90 minutes resembles every YA dystopian sci-fi franchise of the last decade, as well as some popular TV series like The Walking Dead and Falling Skies.

The similarities to earlier franchises extend to the lead actress, Chloe Grace Moretz, who immediately calls to mind Jennifer Lawrence and Shailene Woodley. Moretz plays Cassie Sullivan, one of the few survivors left after a series of alien attacks nearly devastates the earth, The invaders are preparing their final assault, a “5th wave” consisting of aliens who appear human. The army recruits Cassie’s younger brother, along with other surviving children and teenagers, then hastily arms and trains them to detect and fight the infiltrators. In the meantime, Cassie and her mysterious, yet hunky new acquaintance, Evan Walker (Alex Roe), try to find where the Army has taken Cassie’s brother.

The 5th Wave is not a bad movie, merely a by-now overly familiar, unoriginal one. The film is based on a YA novel series by Rick Yancey, and perhaps those characters have greater depth, but here, Cassie is just a resourceful teen who transforms readily into warrior mode. She’s even the center of a similar triangle to that of The Hunger Games, caught between Evan and Ben Parrish (Nick Robinson), the high school jock she had a crush on back home. Of course, adults, in this case the army’s Colonel Vosch (Liev Schreiber) and Sergeant Reznik (Maria Bello), are not to be trusted. Even though there’s a major surprise reveal about one character at the end of the second act, none of the main characters are well developed or seem all that interesting. Director J Blakeson handles the CGI disaster effects and battle scenes well, but 5th Wave overloads the effects into the film’s first half hour. The open-ended conclusion implies sequels to come, but, by now, most audiences would rather see the earlier and fresher movies that inspired The 5th Wave than this 5th generation copy. 
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Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse: Mini-review

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Tye Sheridan

Tye Sheridan’s agent should have been better prepared for Scouts Guide

C-Sometimes, viewers can tell exactly what’s going to be in a movie by its mere title. Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse delivers everything one would expect from that title, for better or worse. One’s enjoyment of the movie depends on one’s enjoyment of zombie jokes, gore, and female nudity, pretty much in that order.

The titular scouts are nice guy Ben (Tye Sheridan), sex-obsessed clown Carter (Logan Miller) and overweight loser Augie (Joey Morgan). They are the only three small town high school kids who are still in the scouts, and when the local population starts turning into zombies, thanks to an accident at a nearby research lab, they are about the only people not infected. They team up with Denise (Sarah Dumont), a waitress at the local strip joint, to try to get help for any remaining uninfected townspeople.

Scouts Guide is an uneven mix of zombie sight gags, a number of them rather funny, and typical adolescent sex and bodily function humor, none of it funny. A sequence involving a room full of zombie cats is hilarious, but most of the sight gags are just that, zombies that look even more ridiculous than normal. Those gags are good for a quick chuckle, and director Christopher Landon keeps them coming at a fast pace. Alas, the zombies can’t be in every scene, and the remainder of the alleged humor consists of sex jokes, usually courtesy of Carter, that wouldn’t have made the cut in an American Pie sequel. The only actors who acquit themselves well are Sheridan, who is much better than this material, and Dumont, who has a future as a kick ass action heroine. Scouts Guide earns its R-rating with copious amounts of  blood and gore (even more so than in serious zombie fare like The Walking Dead) and body parts that get separated from the rest of the zombie at inopportune times. And the less said about a scene in which a zombie Cloris Leachman, sans dentures, tries to gum a victim, the better. Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse has enough clever material to populate a good Saturday Night Live skit, but the rest of the movie is definitely D.O.A.
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Crimson Peak: Mini-review

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Jessica Chastain

Jessica Chastain is far creepier in Crimson Peak than here

BGuillermo del Toro‘s Crimson Peak is one of the best 100-minute Gothic horror films in recent memory, easily reminiscent of the 1940’s Alfred Hitchcock. Unfortunately, the movie lasts two full hours, and, in those last 20 minutes, director del Toro manages to undo a good bit of the mood he’s created and replace it with ineffective CGI ghosts and campy histrionics. 

Crimson Peak begins in the most unlikely of venues, turn-of-the-century Buffalo, NY, where aspiring writer Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) falls for British visitor Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston). She marries Sharpe and returns with him and his sister Edith (Jessica Chastain) to his ancestral home, Crimson Peak, so named because it sits on top of red clay mines Sharpe is trying to modernize to save the family’s finances. But Edith soon discovers that the decaying mansion is home to lots of secrets, both natural and supernatural.

Crimson Peak is a ghostly horror story in which the ghosts are the least scary and most distracting part of the movie. Simply put, the mansion has tons of them, and when they show themselves, they resemble nothing more than leftover extras from The Walking Dead. Before that however, del Toro has crafted a masterful suspense tale with his three lead actors in an isolated wintry setting with plenty of sinister goings on. It’s not giving too much away to reveal that Thomas married Edith more for her family money than anything else, and that he and Lucille may not have her best interests at heart. Jessica Chastain delivers a deliciously wicked performance here as the sister who does not wish Edith well. And, by making Edith more of a feminist than the wallflower the Sharpes had originally envisioned, del Toro alters the dynamic of the eventual duel of wits among them considerably. The director has also created a perfect setting for the film, a magnificently rendered, gigantic decaying monstrosity of a mansion (the roof has holes in it so snow falls indoors). But then, in what’s apparently a woefully misguided attempt to appeal to more jaded, modern horror fans, del Toro dissipates all the erotic tension and suspense he’s created in favor of buckets of CGI ectoplasm and blood. Crimson Peak is too good of a cinematic experience to be completely ruined by its ridiculous ghostly manifestations, but these ghosts were definitely better left unseen.
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