If you’ve kept an eye on the box office lately, you’ve
probably noticed the slew of YA books being turned into films. More
specifically it seems that dystopian themed books are the flavor of the moment:
we’ve got The Hunger Games,
Divergent, Ender’s Game, and, most
recently, The Giver
all making the leap from the page to film (for YA dystopian novices they’re all
highly recommended and are easily available on demand) . Now, joining those
films is The 5th Wave by
Rick Yancey.
The book is the first in a planned trilogy which centers on
a 16 year old girl named Cassie Sullivan. She’s so far survived the first four
waves of alien invasions, but there’s a fifth one rapidly approaching. The
aliens look like humans, and will kill anyone they meet while traveling in the
countryside and backroads, so Cassie can’t trust a soul while traveling alone
in the crumbling ruins of society as she used to know it. However, in her quest
to find and save her brother she meets a fellow survivor named Evan Walker -
but can she trust him?
The book earned Yancey solid reviews, with the New
York Times saying, “it’s a testament to Yancey’s skill that for the
duration of this grown-up’s reading, I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough.” Entertainment Weekly
agreed, hailing it as “a remarkable,
not-to-be-missed-under-any-circumstances book”. Readers loved it as much as
critics with over 240,000 hardcover copies and 55,000 e-books sold
in its first year.
While the book series differs from many of the other big
series popular recently in the YA dystopian genre in that it is much more
sci-fi oriented, it doesn’t quite reach that Star Trek/Star Wars
area of unbelievability that would likely turn away its core audience. It
doesn’t seem as far fetched as, for instance, teenagers fighting to the death
for entertainment of others, or a world where all color, emotion, pain, and
feeling are held by a lone man.
Catching onto the viability of this series first was Sony
Pictures along with producers Graham King and Tobey Maguire, who snatched up
the film rights to the series before it even hit store shelves. The film was in
pre-production and casting for about a year before they announced they’d
casting soon-to-be-”it”-girl Chloe
Grace Moretz as Cassie, the lead character. They also announced they’d
hired directed J. Blakeson (best known for The Disappearance of Alice Creed)
as well as the relatively unknown actors Nick Robinson
as Ben Parish, Malaika
Monroe as Ringer, and Alex
Roe as the mysterious Evan Walker.
Bringing some extra star power to the cast is Liev Schreiber who just signed
on to play the villainous Colonel Vosch. Outside of the casting, we do know
that the book was adapted by screenwriter Susannah Grant who wrote the
screenplays for such hits as Ever After, Erin Brockovich (which
earned her an Academy Award nomination), Pocahontas, and the 90’s
television series Party of Five. To say the book was in good hands is
clearly an understatement.
Aside from that, not much is known about this exciting new
film except for its release date, which is slated to be January 29, 2016. If
you’re not looking forward to waiting that long for your next fix, you’re in
luck! The second book in the series, titled The
Infinite Sea is due to be released on September 16th. However, if
you’re more impatient than that, there has been a trailer
for it released and Britain’s Daily Express newspaper got an exclusive
sneak peak at the book and have an extract available
on their website for you to whet your appetite with.
Elizabeth, thanks again! Great post!
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