If there’s one name that I have come to associate with
sub-standard product, aside from our resident whipping boy Jai Courtney, it’s
one all-time Hollywood hack by the name of Akiva Goldsman. Sure, he has a
couple of winning films to his name like A Beautiful Mind and, depending on who
you ask, I Am Legend, but as a whole, this man is responsible for a lot of
shite as a screenwriter. Last year’s Insurgent, Winter’s Tale the year before,
The Da Vinci Code and Angels &
Demons, and let’s not forget the crowning jewel of bad comic book movies Batman
& Robin; that’s a hefty platter for a single chef. With all this in mind, I
look at today’s most recent YA adaptation with extreme scepticism; only this time, there’s more than definite
reason for me to be so. But, given how lenient I’ve been with The Maze Runner
and how much praise I’ve given to The Hunger Games, and knowing how it doesn’t
get much worse than Divergent, I’m still willing to give this a chance. I’m
holding out an idiot’s hope, aren’t I?
The plot: Aliens are systematically wiping out the human
race through a series of attacks: First came the loss of all power, then severe
natural disasters striking every major city, then an lethal airborne virus
hits, and now they have taken on human form and infiltrated whatever human
civilization is left behind. In the middle of all this, regular teenager Cassie
(Chloë Grace Moretz) loses both of her parents in the proceeding Waves and now
her brother has been taken to a government base for testing. Armed only with
whatever she can scavenge and her own wits, she must fight and navigate her way
to the base, even she doesn’t know who can be trusted along the way.
The scene from the trailer where Moretz goes into a
convenience store and confronts another survivor? That is how the film starts
out and it plays pretty beat-for-beat what is shown there. This is usually a
bad sign, since it means that the most appealing part of the film is right at
the start… sure enough, the film never manages to reach that level of
engagement again. If anything, the film seems determined to completely ignore
that scene from then on. Sure, it continues to work out decently enough for the
rest of the first act, mostly out of how Moretz is seriously trying to sell the
anguish her character’s been given. She’s being surrounded by high school
shenanigans right after the prologue, but not only does it not last long enough
to be all that annoying, it also makes sense considering all of these YA
adaptations are meant to be allegories for high school anyway. Here, it just
drops the pretence with its message about how little high school matters and
how more important and urgent matters await after graduation. The writing is
generic post-apocalypse fare, but considering I have Allegiant to deal with
very soon, I know that I’ll see worse this year.
Enter Evan Walker (Alex Roe) and it’s here the film takes a
very immediate and sharp decline. Let’s start with the character himself:
Critics favourably thought that the original book this was adapted from “should
do for aliens what Twilight did for vampires”. We’ll ignore how that isn’t a
goal that any novelist should be
aiming for and instead consider how Evan seems to be trying to out-creepy
Edward in his first few moments. He ends up rescuing Cassie, because he’s the
love interest, and dresses her wound, undressed
her in her sleep (or possible coma, since she was apparently out of an entire
week), hooked her up to an IV drip and read through her diary. I’ve seen blind
aircraft marshallers give off better signals that this guy, and he hasn’t even
appeared on screen yet. From there, he ends up fulfilling the usual wish fulfilment boyfriend role, complete with shirtless bathing in the river, and…
okay *SPOILERS* just in case, but
really I don’t think it’s worth worrying about; the film isn’t exactly subtle
about anything. Turns out he is one of the Others, only he’s a good Other that wants to help Cassie.
I’d give some credit to how inhuman he is in every scene, including saying the
line “She looks like she’s funny” in all seriousness, but his backstory doesn’t
even allow of that much.
I single out Evan here because, with his entrance,
everything else seems to fall after him. The plot about who or what the Others
actually are is revealed with the military being the real threat, a twist so
weak and telegraphed that I’m not even bothering with a spoiler tag at this
point. What makes this feel like an even bigger misstep is that, with how the
prologue plays out, there was a chance for this film to actually take some
risks with its morality and not play out as one-sided as all the others do. No
such luck there, unfortunately. Their plan, for as needlessly elaborate as it
is, seems to be known by every character in the film for seemingly no reason
other than the plot requires them to. It ends up involving child soldiers,
where what I suspect was meant to be commentary on childhood innocence
involving violence is delivered with an anvil drop, thanks to their fire-fights
being shown through ‘Shooting Gallery FMV Game’ vision. Actually, speaking of
Little Weapons, for as much as this film wants to push the dark and disturbing
button with its plot and character actions, this has got to be one of the
weakest apocalypses I have seen in quite some time. The notions of taking
another human’s life and not knowing who can be trusted? They get brought up
and then never given the chance to grow into anything that can bear fruit. No
paranoid atmosphere is reached, no sheer anguish is shown, no genuine emotion
is portrayed in reaction to what goes on. It only seems to be bringing them up
because it has to.
And speaking of this film doing what it feels it has to, these writers have a very
limited skill set to pull from. This becomes increasingly obvious by how much
the film ends up repeating its own scenes and explanations. For example, we get
a scene between Zombie (Nick Robinson) and Ringer (Maika Monroe) which is meant
to show sexual tension through self-defence training, and then Cassie and Evan
do the same thing right after. Every scene that is meant to show off some
semblance of nuance is repeated twice, and that’s if it has any potential value
to it. If it’s Sam’s teddy bear, then we get constant ‘symbolic’ shots
throughout the entire film. We get it, lost innocence, would you move on
already?! Oh, and let’s not forget all the trite observations about humanity
and “what it means to be human”; because we haven’t seen this in literally every other Body Snatcher film ever made! For all of its talk about
hope and, from the Others’ point of view, our capacity for genocide, it reaches
utter cheesedom when Evan starts talking about love, as if any character in
this film is capable of portraying something complex.
All in all, what starts out as a bland but kind of promising
post-apocalyptic story turns into one of the goofiest and heaviest-handed human
genocides I’ve seen in a long time. Moretz is literally the only actor who
seems to be trying in the entire cast, the writing hits unintentional comedy
more times than it ever touches suspense and the attempts at creating said
suspense pull from a very sparse toolbox that just ends up with the film
constantly repeating itself.
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