PG-13  |  112 min  

Genre: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

Director: J Blakeson

Writer: J Blakeson, Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinkner

Stars: Chloë Grace Moretz, Liev Schreiber Maika Monroe

Plot: Four waves of increasingly deadly alien attacks have left most of Earth decimated. Cassie is on the run, desperately trying to save her younger brother.


Its January, time for a new young adult film to build another franchise upon...

We follow Cassie as she essentially tries to survive these wave of attacks from an unknown source. They come in different forms until we know that it is an alien invasion that is all building up to a final attack.  The first wave is a EMP attack, second being earthquakes and tsunamis, third being an illness, and the fourth being aliens disguising as human to infiltrate the planet. 

When you actually think of the premise of this movie, there is potential for a really cool movie there, if it was done in the tone of say Independence Day but not all potential can live up to the final product. While the movie starts off with a somewhat interesting setting, that characters slowly being doing abnormal things in order to movie the plot along and some making you question why would people even do such a thing?

The second half of the film though goes in a different direction and all of a sudden begins to turn from a somewhat interesting movie, to just another young adult action flick. Even introducing a love triangle that is very much cliche and uninteresting and frankly doesn't make any sense for the context of this worlds current setting. The post-apocalyptic feel of the first half slowly leaves as inspiration from so many different sources start to appear and makes the movie become uninteresting. It also doesn't help that the writing is so bad and only gets worse when the romance is introduced.

I just don't see this movie going on and becoming another big young adult franchise like the others. It follows to many of the cliches for what was a potential good idea. Unfortunately not all good ideas have good executions and this one is an example of that. The movies boils down to just another generic teen film that doesn't do anything to stand out from itself in an age where so many movies are similar to it. It would be one thing if the film was good, than the similarities would be much more forgiven, but because the film is not that enjoyable in the first place this one doesn't get the treatment.  

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