Wave goodbye

SPOILER ALERT (for a duff movie, I would add)

The Fifth Wave is another film that I am surprised was made: it is yet another unoriginal, cliché ridden teen movie with lots of shooting and running around but with a narrative so thin as to make a lettuce leaf look fat. Seriously, how do these films get made? Is there a building in LA full of producers with more money than sense who think they can just cash in on the Hunger Games and the Twilight Saga?

Teenagers (and the rest of us) deserve better than this! Why aren't they making the rest of the Northern Lights trilogy into a thumping good movie (with a different director from the first one: Golden Compass)? There's a good complex narrative that deserves some big screen CGI and which does not insult the intelligence of its audience! You can probably tell that I am not going to recommend you seeing The Fifth Wave, even when it is broadcast free on terrestrial TV...

(SPOILER ALERT) A Marxist analysis of the film would probably suggest that it is hark back to the films of the 1950s which were held to be reflections of cold war paranoia. In this movie, "The Others" could well be an allegory for Islamist Terrorists who 'look like us but are not like us', and seek to create child soldiers etc... That as maybe, the film is certainly about deception...

Should leaders ever deceive those that they wish to lead? Is it part of good leadership to dress up the truth a little and maybe put a good spin on things... I am sure that most people would stop short of actual lying but should leaders tell "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth"? Can certain details be omitted for the sake of the bigger prize? Or do we do all of this naturally anyway?

What is the truth?

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Blog 147: in my 2014/15/16 series of blogs about leadership ideas to be found in the movies of our time. You can read here as why I began doing this (with an update at the end of 2014 and 2015). Please subscribe to this blog if you want to read more. Thanks. Click the label 'film' to see all the others.