If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.”

Rick Yancey’s novel The 5th Wave opens with that quote from Stephen Hawking which, at this point, isn’t so much an insight as a cliché. Science-fiction has been rejiggering colonial narratives practically since it began as a genre: HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds directly compares the alien invasion of England to Britain’s invasion of Tasmania. The nightmare is so familiar now it’s almost banal: what oh what would happen if someone, somewhere, treated us the way we treated them?

The film version of The 5th Wave, in theaters now, stays true to the formula – though with an interesting twist or two. Rather than a single deadly invasion, the aliens (called “Others”) unleash a series of escalating genocides. First, there’s an EMP burst, knocking the planet back to a pre-industrial age – so all humanity is on a par with those pre-industrial societies the west invaded way back when. Then, the aliens generate earthquakes and gigantic floods, destroying coastal cities. And next they unleash an avian flu, using birds as carriers (allowing the filmmakers to make a cutesy aural nod to the electronic twittering in Hitchcock’s The Birds.)

As The 5th Wave flounders at the global box office, YA sci-fi faces endgame Read more

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. That’s a thoughtful analogy of the way that colonialism works. The European occupation of the New World didn’t involve a single depopulation of the continent. 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. 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.

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. 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. This is what it feels like, colonialists. Bad, right? So maybe reconsider?

The problem with the anti-colonialist reading, though, is that The 5th Wave’s sense of colonialism as tragedy is so tied to suburbia. 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 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. The lesson isn’t, that has happened to us, and now we see it sucks. The lesson is, boy that would suck if it happened to us.

The 5th Wave review – impressive but lacking the Katniss factor Read more

The “us” here is quite circumscribed. 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. We certainly don’t see what the various waves of genocide mean to the people living on Indian reservations. 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.

Maybe the most disturbing part of the film’s invasion parable is its use of children as colonial catspaws. The 5th Wave” of the title refers to the Others’ plans to create a child army. Human kids and teens are captured, brainwashed, and sent out to kill other humans. 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. Children are not responsible for their actions; if they are the colonial occupiers, then suddenly you feel sorry for the colonial occupiers, rather than for the folks who are getting shot. Genocide becomes a kind of psychological accident; the people who commit it are manipulated by hazy forces and know not what they do.

Columbus, though, knew what he was doing when he ordered his troops to rape Taino children and chop off people’s hands. And you have to think The 5th Wave knows what it’s doing too, with its idyllic vision of American normalcy and its spunky blonde heroine. We’re way past five genocides here on this continent Columbus invaded, but that doesn’t mean we’re done. This wave we’re in now is the one in which we take native people’s stories as our own, and, standing on their graves, forget that they ever existed, or that they still do.