YA Adaptation The 5th Wave Adds Chloe Moretz
This article is more than 2 years old
Until people stop watching them, we’re destined to have movie theaters full to overflowing with adaptations of young adult novels. Hell, no one watched movies like I Am Number Four, Beautiful Creatures, Vampire Academy, or Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, but that didn’t stop Divergent or The Maze Runner from happening. Movies like The Hunger Games and Twilight make enough money that studios are willing to risk a few duds in order to launch the next big franchise. Sony Pictures has picked up the rights to recent addition The 5th Wave, and have found their star in Chloe Moretz.
Based on Rick Yancey’s novel, The 5th Wave follows a young girl named Cassie Sullivan, a role that Moretz will presumably play. She has survived four attacks on the population of Earth—the waves mentioned in the title. The 16-year-old finds herself on the run with her younger brother. When they meet a mysterious stranger, he may be their last hope of survival, but they don’t know whether they can trust him or not.
Here’s some more about the novel:
After the 1st wave, only darkness remains. After the 2nd, only the lucky escape. And after the 3rd, only the unlucky survive. After the 4th wave, only one rule applies: trust no one.
Now, it’s the dawn of the 5th wave, and on a lonely stretch of highway, Cassie runs from Them. The beings who only look human, who roam the countryside killing anyone they see. Who have scattered Earth’s last survivors. To stay alone is to stay alive, Cassie believes, until she meets Evan Walker. Beguiling and mysterious, Evan Walker may be Cassie’s only hope for rescuing her brother—or even saving herself. But Cassie must choose: between trust and despair, between defiance and surrender, between life and death. To give up or to get up.
This seems like a good role for Moretz. Most known for playing pint-sized badass Hit-Girl in the Kick-Ass movies, and for her turn as a blood-soaked adolescent loner in the Carrie remake, the young thespian can actually act, and is good in everything she appears in. The premise, at least in theory, sounds like it will give her some serious material to work with, a kind of post-apocalyptic alien invasion story.
The rest of the creative team is also coming together nicely. GK films Graham King and Tobey Maguire will produce the picture, and Susannah Grant (Erin Brokovich) wrote the script. J Blakeson, who is most known for 2009’s twisted kidnapping thriller The Disappearance of Alice Creed, will direct The 5th Wave. If you’re worried that this will be more light, airy pap, hopefully Blakeson’s involvement means it will stick to the darker side of spectrum. The set up certainly allows for that, and it would be a welcome change from YA adaptations that never quite go as dark as they need to be truly successful.
