Four waves of increasingly deadly alien attacks have left most of Earth decimated. Cassie is on the run, desperately trying to save her younger brother. – IMDB
The movie opens with a teenager (Chloë Grace Moretz) exiting the woods and approaching a gas station. She is carrying an AR-15, so this is either a post-apocalyptic society or the Deep South. She starts looking around for supplies and stumbles upon a guy who is wounded. He’s asking for help, but our presumptive heroine seems pretty nervous. He’s reaching for something, is it a gun? Too late, she shot him. Turns out it was a crucifix.
This movie is called The Fifth Wave, so we clearly need a recap of the first four (since we don’t know them). Aliens show up unannounced and hover silently over major cities, just like in other movies you’ve seen (Independence Day, District 9). Ten days later a massive EMP hits the whole Earth (presumably) and knocks out all the power. Planes fall from the sky (a la Revolution). This is the First Wave.
Jacq Vaucan is an insurance agent of ROC robotics corporation who investigates cases of robots violating their primary protocols against altering themselves. What he discovers will have profound consequences for the future of humanity.
The movie opens saying in 2044 massive solar flares attacked the Earth, killing 97.3% of the population. Humanity took a turn for the worse, losing both technical prowess and being whittled down to about 21 million people when we catch up with them. Just after the calamity, some company (ROC?) made the breakthrough in humanoid robots. These robots were supposed to be the saviors of mankind, but I guess they amounted to a whole lot of nothing. They also have only two laws, which makes for a 33% discount from those manufactured by US Robotics. Law one, don’t hurt anything living. Law two, robots aren’t allowed to repair or modify themselves.
Now we are taken to a police man (Dylan McDermott) in a car. His radio says it will start raining in ten seconds, and it does, so this might be a Back to the Future 2 kind of future. He drives a short distance and then decides to walk around in a subway or something. What should he uncover, but lo and behold, a robot. And this robot seems to be fixing itself! This cop decides to go all Judge Dredd on the robot and shoots it in the face.
Blair, a fighter pilot, joins an interstellar war to fight the evil Kilrathi who are trying to destroy the universe.
This jacket cover makes the movie sound pretty exciting, so I’m optimistic. They definitely aren’t allowed to misrepresent a movie on these things.
The opening credits say based on the games and novels by Chris Roberts. Then it says directed by the same Chris Roberts. Video game design and making movies are basically the same, so I’m sure in hindsight this will be viewed as the good decision it obviously is. You don’t want to bog down a film production with a director who has experience or a proven track record.
The movie opens with some exposition that mankind was conquering space and everything until they ran into a race of aliens called the Kilrathi and now they are in a desperate war against them. On the space station Pegasus, it is business as usual, until a Kilrathi fleet comes out of nowhere and easily destroys all the ships and boards the station. Their target? The computer that allows humans to travel through space. The CO of the station tries somewhat comically to shoot and smash his way into the computer room to prevent it from falling into enemy hands, but to no avail. Instead he sends out a little distress pod and goes down with the station. The Kilrathi now have access to the CO’s computer! Let’s hope there wasn’t anything inappropriate on there…
Now we cut to a small cargo ship, the Diligent. This ship has a crew of one old guy (Tchéky Karyo) named Taggart and two rookie pilots being transported to their first assignment in deep space. The two pilots are Lt. Blair (Freddie Prince Jr.) and Lt. Marshall (Matthew Lillard). Wing Commander is the second of what is apparently five match-ups of Freddie Prinze Jr. and Matthew Lillard. Matthew Lillard, of course, having his acting career destroyed by Scooby Doo movies, and has subsequently spent the last 12 years of his life doing little else other than rehashing the character Shaggy.
In the future, Highlander Connor MacLeod must prevent the destruction of Earth under an anti-ozone shield.
Let’s pretend Highlander II: The Quickening is a stand alone movie and isn’t a sequel to a Cult Classic.
The movie opens in the future setting of 1999. Apparently the Earth’s ozone is gone and people are dying by the millions, including MacLeod’s wife. On her death bed she makes him promise to stop that terrible burden on society called ‘The Sun’ no matter it what it takes. Flash forward a little bit and MacLeod (Christopher Lambert) is now leading a team of scientists. They appear to have successfully built a death ray to finally give the sun a taste of its own medicine. Oh wait, I guess it is a planetary shield. Well, same difference for the Earth.
