THINK OF ALL the things you liked about Independence Day. Now think of all the things you hated about Twilight. These are good jumping-off points for the very bumpy viewing experience that is The Fifth Wave.

The film is based on a series of young adult novels, which is a sentence I've written at least 100 times in the last four years. It stars Chloë Grace Moretz as a teenage girl who... you know what, it doesn't really matter. It's a dystopian future with fighting children, and she's the one who's got the pluck to bring the whole thing down, and maybe love-triangle some hunky male teens while she's at it. The title refers to all of the steps that a group of aliens must take to kill everyone on Earth, and it's an awful lot of steps for such a master race, especially once you get to the eponymous fifth wave, which is an all-around terrible plan. If I get much more into the plot, you may have some of the same questions that I did, such as: Why? And, what the hell? And can't she tell those people are obviously aliens??

But you're reading this to find out if the film is good, a question I'll answer with some more questions. What is "good?" Are explosions "good"? Yes, we can all agree on that. Is kissing "good"? Sure, sometimes! Are aliens "good"? Totally! Is choosing love, against all odds "good"? Personally, I would have been fine with just the explosions. The Fifth Wave lost me whenever it tried to inject some personality into its extremely boring characters—who, like the planet, were already fucked from the word go, so why bother?

The Fifth Wave should have stuck with action and collapsing cities and broken infrastructure, then called itself Independence Day Jr. THAT movie sounds fucking sweet.