The reference to the underage warriors in Ender’s Game is hard to miss – and as in that novel, the plot of The 5th Wave works with suspicious diligence to make genocide the work of innocents. Human kids and teens are captured, brainwashed, and sent out to kill other humans. The 5th Wave” of the title refers to the Others’ plans to create a child army.

Maybe the most disturbing part of the film’s invasion parable is its use of children as colonial catspaws. As writer Jimmy Johnson said recently in a post on my blog, “Settler everyday life is the anti-native and anti-black apocalypse but for we settlers, it is just life.” We’re so busy imagining our civilization in ruins we can’t see the ruins of the civilization on which we built our homes. We certainly don’t see what the various waves of genocide mean to the people living on Indian reservations. The starring cast is virtually all white, and though the devastation on earth is supposed to be nationwide, we barely see glimpses of destruction anywhere other than the landscape of Midwestern Ohio. The lesson is, boy that would suck if it happened to us. The lesson isn’t, that has happened to us, and now we see it sucks. The alien invasion is ironic and horrible because it is happening to this everyday, middle-class, cast of attractive movie-star looking folks: to could-be cheerleaders and football captains and one tough-talking sort-of goth girl. 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.

Cassie and evan the 5th wave