The 5th Wave: horror without fear, science fiction without ideas

Even before the storm, all three of the biggest new releases this weekend—the Robert De Niro/Zac Efron road trip comedy Dirty Grandpa, the young adult sci-fi invasion yarn The 5th Wave, and the doll-centric horror tale The Boy—were tracking around

Oh yes, there are another two books in author Rick Yancey's 5th Wave sequence. To be fair, many of the film's problems stem from the truncations and elaborations that come from adapting the first book in a YA trilogy. But too often, characters feel the

Even before the storm, all three of the biggest new releases this weekend—the Robert De Niro/Zac Efron road trip comedy Dirty Grandpa, the young adult sci-fi invasion yarn The 5th Wave, and the doll-centric horror tale The Boy—were tracking around

Even before the storm, all three of the biggest new releases this weekend—the Robert De Niro/Zac Efron road trip comedy Dirty Grandpa, the young adult sci-fi invasion yarn The 5th Wave, and the doll-centric horror tale The Boy—were tracking around

This photo provided by Sony Pictures Entertainment shows, Nick Robinson as Ben Parish in a scene from the Columbia Pictures release, "The 5th Wave." The movie opens in U.S. theaters on Jan. 22, 2016. (Chuck Zlotnick/Sony/Columbia Pictures via AP).