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.
