But that means it's working from a familiar framework about teen empowerment in crisis. It feels more commercially conscious than culturally conscious: it's out to build a franchise and an ensemble of tough, lovable characters capable of selling another two films. At best, it tries to tap into the way the Hunger Games books and films turned embattled teen-girl heroes into a profitable cinematic movement, and Twilight turned teen love triangles featuring dangerous, exotic boys into a craze. The film, which adapts Rick Yancey's bestselling 2013 young-adult novel, doesn't tap into any particular collective concern, or into any ideas larger than a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other action-adventure. Which is part of the reason an alien-invasion drama like The 5th Wave feels so fundamentally hollow. And the urge to angst over whether any given new form of technology will wither our humanity is as old as the genre, and as new as Ex Machina's fresh take on the theme.

Anxieties over the space race became a dominant theme in science fiction from Sputnik to Alien. Invasion Of The Body Snatchers turned the 1950s' communism-related paranoia into an eerie metaphor. Metropolis expressed fears about the class divide back in the 1920s.

The greatest science-fiction films, like the greatest horror films, usually channel the sublimated terrors of their era.

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