By Ian Bonham

The 5^th Wave (15)

Staring : Chloë Grace Moretz, Nick Robinson, Alex Roe

Director : J Blakeson

Writers : Susannah Grant, Akiva Goldsmith, Jeff Pinker (Screenplay), Rick Yancy (Novel)

Duration : 1 hour, 58 minutes

Showing at Kings Bastion Leisure Cinemas to 28^th January

Hollywood continues its desperate search for the next 'Hunger Games' or 'Twilight', and the latest entry into the YA category is 'The 5^th Wave'. A highly regarded novel by Rick Yancy, it ticks just about every box as YA literature, so how hard can it bet to get a great movie out of it? Quite hard it seems, quite hard indeed!

Now I'll be honest upfront, I do like Rick's novel. It's a really good book fully employing the use of flashback techniques to put flesh on the bones of the story you find yourself in. There are two plot threads running in separate sections spilt throughout the book following different characters.

We begin with Cassie Sullivan, played by the superb Chloë Grace Moretz (who I loved as 'Hit-Girl' in 'Kick Ass'). We meet Cassie the same way we do in the book, she is shooting a Police Officer. She explains in voice-over this is not who she was, and we are back in time meeting her in her old school. Through the course of this flashback we discover what exactly is happening to Earth.

The movie, in the same way as the book, begins to continue the tale of the two lead characters and the very different situations they find themselves in. Right up until this point I was very happy. As a fan of the book I was glad to see the film was respecting the source book quite closely, with just enough alteration to keep it on the right side of a 15 certificate. After all, there is no point making a YA movie if Young Adults can't actually go and see it, right?

My smile started to sink from here on in. We have three credited Screenwriters here, and that at times starts to worry me. The script has been through various versions, and we don't count the 'Script Doctors' in the credits for some reason (they are called in to 'tweak' parts of the script prior to, or sometimes during production if something isn't working).

They are obviously desperate to keep it at a 15 certificate, preferably below, but the source here means they were always going to get a 15. They also want to keep it under 2 hours, because the attention span of a Young Adult wouldn't go past 2 hours (apparently, according to Hollywood Execs). So the scalpels come out and parts of story deemed unnecessary are excised. However, here they didn't use a scalpel, they used machetes. Certain relationships, or indeed whole characters, from the novel make no sense any more when included in the movie now. As we head into the final act, I am left feeling slightly not bothered about the two-dimensional characters we are left with. We've seen them all a million times before, in a million other movies and are just beyond caring here.

This is movie making by numbers, and I am sure it will put bums on seats. I'm just a bit disappointed with the way the studio have handled a great property (nothing new there). This is obviously a franchise set up, and they could have made two movies out of this book, but they wouldn't take a gamble on a new franchise launching over two movies. However, I think if they made two really good movies they would be raking it in.

Last week I was questioning if the story in “Carol” was over-stretched to 2 hours. Here I am complaining they could have done so much more, with such a great novel they have spent a lot buying the rights to! I feel at the end like I went camping, and had tent poles, a great tent canvas, but someone has nicked all my tent pegs.