The 5th Wave

Chloë Grace Moretz faces the alien equivalent of the biblical plagues of Egypt in this dreadful "tweenage" potboiler. Moretz plays a high-school student who's separated from her younger brother and forced to search for him after aliens arrive. But these imaginatively named "Others" only want the planet, not the people, so they instigate a global power outage, then earthquakes and floods, a bird-flu pandemic and infiltration in human guise. And the titular 5th wave? An all-out attack, but with the film's only genuine twist. It's director J Blakeson's first foray into sci-fi but he exhausts the so-so special effects in the first few minutes, then falls back on a jumble of every survival, alien-invasion and teen-romance clichéknown to movie-going man, woman and child. Moretz gives this "tween"-targeted twaddle way more welly than it deserves, however the movie never rises above the muddled mediocre. A nonsensical ending threatens a sequel, but don't hold your breath.