Orphaned and on the run she's heading for a military base, where her five-year-old brother, Sammy (Zackary Arthur), is in the tender care of Liev Schreiber's Colonel Vosch. We pick up 16-year-old Cassie Sullivan (Chloe Grace Moretz) in a Ohio forest. The main game has the aliens assuming human form and staging a mass infiltration operation. But these misfortunes are just curtain-raisers, summarily covered in flashback.

Then comes a series of earthquakes and tsunamis, followed by an avian flu pandemic. First, the aliens knock out all electronic power, crashing cars, bringing down planes and shutting off essential services. It's an invasion in stages, however, allowing plenty of scope for other familiar forms of mass destruction. It's an adaptation of the first book in the bestselling trilogy by Rick Yancey, who has nominated an alien invasion as his trigger for Armageddon. The latest dystopian fantasy to join its franchise wars is The 5th Wave, which is touting its literary provenance as its strongest weapon.

How will the world end? Hollywood is still keeping itself busy counting the ways.