Right at the beginning of the film, Claire (Chloe Grace Moetz) declares “I was a totally normal high school girl” as we get a flashback of typical innocent movie teen partying. The problem with the anti-colonialist reading, though, is that The 5th Wave’s sense of colonialism as tragedy is so tied to suburbia. This is what it feels like, colonialists. You could, therefore, see The 5th Wave as a deliberately anti-colonial film, just as The War of the Worlds was, to some extent, an effort to get the English to think about what they were doing abroad.
These echoes of US colonialism are quite conscious – the Others’ military chief in the film even makes an offhand reference to earth’s history of imperial wars and extermination. That last in particular is mirrored in The 5th Wave: the alien Others round up children in yellow school buses for the purposes of military indoctrination. It started with Columbus’s vicious campaign of rape, torture and death in the Caribbean, moved through various smallpox epidemics and wars, wound on to forced migration on the Trail of Tears, and continued with forced deculturation, as Indigenous peoples’ children were taken and educated by their conquerors. The European occupation of the New World didn’t involve a single depopulation of the continent. That’s a thoughtful analogy of the way that colonialism works. Genocide in The 5th Wave isn’t a one and done endeavor it’s a long-term process, with many little atrocities lodged inside it. And next they unleash an avian flu, using birds as carriers (allowing the filmmakers to make a cutesy aural nod to the electronic twittering in Hitchcock’s The Birds.) Then, the aliens generate earthquakes and gigantic floods, destroying coastal cities. First, there’s an EMP burst, knocking the planet back to a pre-industrial age – so all humanity is on a par with those pre-industrial societies the west invaded way back when.
CHLOE MORETZ THE 5TH WAVE SERIES
Rather than a single deadly invasion, the aliens (called “Others”) unleash a series of escalating genocides. The film version of The 5th Wave, in theaters now, stays true to the formula – though with an interesting twist or two. The nightmare is so familiar now it’s almost banal: what oh what would happen if someone, somewhere, treated us the way we treated them? Science-fiction has been rejiggering colonial narratives practically since it began as a genre: HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds directly compares the alien invasion of England to Britain’s invasion of Tasmania. Rick Yancey’s novel The 5th Wave opens with that quote from Stephen Hawking which, at this point, isn’t so much an insight as a cliché. If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.”
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