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'5th Wave' an accidentally comical alien invasion tale

The 1st Wave: Alien invaders disable all energy-powered machines by dispatching an electromagnetic pulse around the Earth.

The 2nd Wave: Alien invaders cause tsunamis in oceans, lakes, rivers and presumably fish aquariums.

The 3rd Wave: Alien invaders unleash a deadly bird virus that fails to kill just enough teen Earthlings to populate a modestly budgeted dystopian movie franchise based on a young adult best-seller.

The 4th Wave: Alien invaders take human form by placing nasty-looking green creatures in people's heads.

The 5th Wave: Alien invaders launch the ultimate weapon, a Dumbness Ray from which nobody escapes.

I can pinpoint the moment when J Blakeson - the director with a punctuation-challenged name - unleashes the Dumbness Ray in his sci-fi thriller "The 5th Wave."

It happens when a blonde high school hottie named Cassie Sullivan (Chloe Grace Moretz) takes a sniper's bullet to the thigh and passes out.

Then, she awakens later in a strange house occupied by a devastatingly handsome farm lad named Evan Walker (Alex Roe, with his hair and 10 o'clock shadow painstakingly crafted to look casual).

You can almost hear Tchaikovsky's "Romeo & Juliet" as their eyes lock.

In this moment, Blakeson's movie goes from a promising science-fiction thriller with impressive visual effects to an inadvertently funny teen romance so badly conceived that not even Nicholas Sparks could rewrite it.

"I couldn't save my parents," Evan burbles to Cassie, "but I could save you!"

This is only one of the laughable clinkers in a screenplay attributed to Susannah Grant, Jeff Pinkner and Oscar-winning writer Akiva ("A Beautiful Mind") Goldsman.

My favorite line: "You make me want to be human again!"

Or it might be Cassie's voice-over narrator saying, "The Others see our hope as a weakness! But it's our hope that makes us human!"

"The Others," by the way, is what Earthlings call the never-seen alien invaders. Apparently, no reference to Nicole Kidman's scary 2001 ghost tale "The Others" is intended.

Cassie's mom and dad die, leaving Cassie, a Franklin High School Panthers cheerleader, to protect her younger brother Sam (Zackary Arthur), a duty she royally botches.

Sam gets whisked away to a military base run by a brass-tacks colonel (Liev Schreiber) anxious to train young recruits on how to fight aliens.

His strongest asset turns out to be Maria Bello's hilariously overacted Sergeant Reznik, a pasty-faced soldier armed to the teeth with killer lipstick.

Cassie's strongest asset turns out to be her secret high school crush, Ben Parish (Nick Robinson), who now goes by the name "Zombie."

Poor Ben gets pressed into military service for the Colonel by Reznik, who shouts, "This isn't summer camp, Zombie! You're a soldier now!"

At this point in "The 5th Wave," I began to suspect that Rick Yancey's best-seller had been refashioned into a Nicholas Sparks sci-fi parody.

But director J Blakeson never noticed.

Former high school cheerleader Cassie (Chloë Grace Moretz) teams up with her secret crush (Nick Robinson) to fight aliens in “The 5th Wave.”

“The 5th Wave”

★ ½

Starring: Chloe Grace Moretz, Nick Robinson, Maria Bello, Liev Schreiber, Alex Roe

Directed by: J Blakeson

Other: A Columbia Pictures release. Rated PG-13 for language, violence, teen partying. 112 minutes

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