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Main Characters
Cassiopeia "Cassie" Sullivan
Played By: Chloë Grace Moretz
- Action Survivor: Without getting any kind of military training, she outfights and outthinks Others posing as well-trained human soldiers through her instincts and more than a little luck.
- Big Sister Instinct: Do not even think about touching Cassie's younger brother. Dare to anyway, and she will hunt you down and put a bullet in your head, even if it takes her months or even years.
- Daddy's Girl: You get the impression that Cassie was this before her dad was brutally killed by the Others impersonating the military.
- Deadpan Snarker: Her stinging sense of humor is one of the few traces of humanity she still has.
- I Will Find You: Cassie's main goal is to find and rescue her five-year-old brother.
- Older Than She Looks: She's sixteen but one of the books later reveals that she looks twelve.
- Schmuck Bait: She uses some on Nurse Pam. She shoves her tracking implant up Pam's nose while the latter is unconscious. How Nurse Pam failed to notice when she had the kill switch in hand is a mystery.
- Small Girl, Big Gun: Cassie and her precious, precious M16.
- Stellar Name: Cassiopeia is a constellation.
- Took a Level in Badass: In Cassie's back story, she's your average schoolgirl. Now, she's a gun-toting badass who kills aliens.
Benjamin "Ben" Parrish
Played By: Nick Robinson
- Character Death: About half-way through the second book, Cassie finds his corpse while fighting one of the two divisions of Child Soldiers Vosch sent after them. Proves subverted when Cassie learns he was playing possum, and Evan returned into their lives.
- Crazy Jealous Guy: He does not take the reunion with Evan well, at all. It doesn't help that Evan tried to subdue them all as part of said reunion.
- A Father to His Men: The primary reason he winds up as squad leader and later Sergeant, while Flint and Ringer get passed over. Especially profound is that Ringer is far more skilled and experienced than he is.
- I Gave My Word: Desite how sucidal it is, he returns to Camp Heaven to rescue "Nugget" because he promised to do it. Fortunately both Cassie and Evan run an independent op to do the same thing, and they greatly increase each other's chance of success.
- I Let Gwen Stacy Die: A non-romantic example with Ben's sister, Sissy.
- Love Triangle: By the end of the first book, he winds up romantically entangled with both Cassie and Ringer. They're both fully aware and fully okay with it. What problems the girls have with each other has nothing to do with Ben.
- Tragic Keepsake: Sissy's locket.
Evan Walker
Played By: Alex Roe
- Agent Peacock: Evan is a handsome, Pretty Boy-esque guy whose perfectly-manicured nails Cassie comments on multiple times. He's also a Silencer, and one of the most badass members of the main cast.
- Becoming the Mask: He starts out impersonating a human as a manchurian agent. He winds up becoming one after fusing with Evan's true personality and romancing Cassie.
- Grew a Spine: The Silencer, a.k.a. Evan Walker, kills people so the Others can colonize, even though he completely disagrees with it. By the end of the novel, he stands up to the Others and does what's right.
- Heroic Sacrifice: He goes into the very heart of "Camp Heaven" to make sure the death camp is destroyed, for good. He fails to return.
- Humanity Is Infectious: He explains the Silencer mindset this way.
- Internalized Categorism: He grows to hate the Silencers, including himself.
Samuel "Sammy" Sullivan
Played By: Zackary Arthur
- Break the Cutie: Sammy's five years old, and subjected to horrible humiliation, not to mention physical peril and abuse, in an attempt to make him into a child soldier.
- Embarrassing Nickname: Private Nugget, even for a five-year-old.
Ringer
Played By: Maika Monroe
- Aloof Dark-Haired Girl: A straight example: Ringer is tall, attractive and dark-haired with plenty of aloof.
- Cool Big Sis: Teacup immediately comes to see her this way when she's added to their unit.
- Emotionless Girl: Her ability to smile is the first thing the Others took from her. No matter how he tries, Ben simply fails to elicit one. He refuses to give up.
- Empowered Badass Normal: She was able to take on Silencers before being captured by Vosch. Then he installs "the 12th system", and she can jump out of helicopters, at parachute heights, and escape without a scratch.
- Living Emotional Crutch: When Zombie's first command starts going south and badly, Teacup immediately latches on to her.
- Madden Into Misanthropy: The cruelty of the Others have pretty much wiped out whatever internal censor she had. Aside from professional soldier conduct, she doesn't hesitate to voice her opinion about anyone or anything.
- Mentor Archetype: She's the one who teaches Zombie how to shoot properly, and thanks to her teachings, his accuracy, reaction time, and competence with firearms increases by leaps and bounds.
- Race Lift: Ringer is part Asian, part Native American in the books, but played by a white actress in the film.
- Reforged into a Minion: In the third book, Vosh has her implanted, against her will, with a cybernetic control, and 40,000 nanites to "enhance" her, but in exchange for all but stealing away her free will.
- Smart People Play Chess: She lists chess as one of her hobbies when introduced in the book, and whenever she wants to praise Ben, she loudly wishes that he played chess too.
Alexander Vosch
Played By: Liev Schreiber
- Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad: He either believes or makes a damn good show of believing, or both that the Alien Invasion is a benevolent intervention, like incarcerating a drug addict, to stop mankind from destroying itself, if only humans discarded their humanity and embraced "Nothing."
- Big Bad: The closest to one shown so far.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: He acts like a friendly and reasonable Colonel trying to save humanity. He's anything but.
- Broken Pedestal: Zombie gets to quite admire Vosch before finding out the reality of the situation.
- The Chessmaster: By the end of the novel, you realize that he is successfully manipulating the remaining human youth into bringing about the extinction of their own species by convincing them the humans are the aliens and vice versa.
- Consummate Liar: Every word the guy says is suspect.
- Expy: By the time the third book rolls around, he sounds more and more suspiciously like "The God Child" from Mass Effect. In fact, Ringer all but lampshades it.Their plan was to sow distrust among the survivors, now the distrust has turned upon them. Bet they never expected to be the reapers of what they sow... The Reapers.
- Hannibal Lecture: Combined with Breaking Speech. He tries to drive Cassie and Ben over the Despair Event Horizon by pointing out how utterly outsmarted and outgambited humanity is while preparing to kill Sammy.
- Humans Are Insects: When he doesn't feel the need to hide his intentions, he happily compares humanity to cockroaches, and even shows disguist simply pushing the Big Red Button that he knows results in instant death upon one.
- Leave No Witnesses: His standard MO. He kills anyone and everyone he thinks might stumble unto the truth, and then comes back to confesses to it as an I Did What I Had to Do moment, with Crocodile Tears.
- A Nazi by Any Other Name: Runs a death-camp? Check. Runs around with military gear to round up survivors and refugees? Check. Sports an extreme fascistic view of his own race's inherent superiority? Chek and mate.
- Torture for Fun and Information: Despite "Wonderland" supposedly being able to map human brains and take all their knowledge, he still chooses to torture Ben and Cassie to learn how they were able to infiltrate Camp Heaven to try and rescue Sammy.
- Villain: Exit, Stage Left: In the first book, he leaves Cassie, Ben and Sammy in the hands of two Silencer subordinates as he makes final preparations to abandon Camp Heaven.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Vosch is attempting to send humanity back to the Stone Age to prevent humanity from destroying both itself and Earth's ecosystem.
- What Were You Thinking?: Numerous characters constantly wonder what he was thinking, not only trying to turn children into child soldiers to hunt their own kind, but putting a 5-year-old into a combat unit when he doesn't even have the strength to actually lift the rifles properly, let alone use them.
- Would Hurt a Child: He straps Sammy into the death-chair, and pushes the button that would blow his implant, while forcing Cassie, and Benjamin to watch, just to hammer home how much he thinks humanity should be exterminated and has no hope.
Other Characters
Grace
One of the "Others" who finds Evan Walker in the second book.
- The Cake Is a Lie: She fully believes that once Earth's native human population is exterminated, in its entirety, and the planet's "wiped clean," she and all the "Others" will have their memories of the act completely erased, and their consciousness will be downloaded into "true humans." How she believes any of this is even remotely plausible beggars the mind.
- Collector of the Strange: Evan finds out to his horror that she collects trophies from her victims. Some of these are truly barbaric, such as scalps and other body parts.
- Double Think: She claims to be unable to stand the scent of humans, yet collects body-parts from her victims as trophies. She looks forward to "the end of the hunt" because it means getting her memories wiped clean, yet claims she wants to hold on to the "good ones."
- Foil: To Evan. While he was utterly shocked and horrified by his "awakening," she's fully embraced her true nature.
- Humans Are Insects: She compares an Other falling in love with a human, as a human falling in love with a sea-slug.
- Lack of Empathy: Doesn't give a crap about anyone or anything, outside of the big agenda.
- Manchurian Agent: She's an "Other" in human skin, completely unaware until she "awakened."
- Sadist: She doesn't just want to kill humans, she wants to cause them as much pain as possible in the process.
- Slasher Smile: Her default expression.
- The Vamp: She uses sex as a weapon, and tried it on Evan, repeatedly.
- Virtue Is Weakness: She outright tells Evan, to his face, that he should never have been "integrated" as Evan cares about "them" (meaning humans) too much.
- You're Insane!: Said word for word to Evan when she realized he fell in love with a human.
Sergeant Reznik
Played by: Maria Bello
- Drill Sergeant Nasty: Zombie grows convinced that he's trying to train the children to be soldiers, by trying to kill them.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: His own cruel and harsh training is what does him in.
- Jerkass: Reznik's kinda this.Reznik: Private Zombie, did your mother have any children that lived?Ben (Zombie): Sir! Yes, sir!Reznik: I bet when you were born she took one look at you and tried to shove you back in!
- Villain Respect: He promotes Zombie to squad leader, and demotes Flintstone, because Zombie was willing to stand up to him to protect Nugget, a member of his squad.
- Xanatos Gambit: "Zombie's first mission is clearing out "Teds" supposedly armed with Stinger missiles who were using them against Camp Haven. Reznik is there waiting with a sniper-rifle and a box with a kill switch for each member of the unit. When Zombie's unit arrives, he fires sniper rounds at them. Either he terrifies them into killing the "Teds" or he kills Zombie's unit if they come after him. Either way, he wins by reducing the number of human survivors. He never dreamed that Ringer would think of removing the implants first.
Minor Characters
Teacup
Played By: Talitha Bateman
- Ascended Fangirl: Of Ringer.
- The Baby of the Bunch: Until "Nugget" came along, and she resented him for that.
- Fragile Speedster: Given her young age, Teacup is capable of moving quickly but is more vulnerable to injury.
- Miles Gloriosus: While in boot-camp, she was the most violent, trigger-happy, and boastful. On the actual battlefield, she completely falls apart. Then again, she's seven years old.
- The Smurfette Principle: She was the only girl in unit T-62. She was initially upset when Ringer came and changed that, until Ringer tookdown Flint from across the room, for a vulgar, sexist remark, in seconds.
Tank
Played By: Flynn McHugh
- Killed to Uphold the Masquerade: Zombie and Ringer come to this conclusion after realizing that the "alien detector" equipment responds to their implants, or lack thereof, not to the actual aliens.
- Sanity Slippage: He grows increasingly unstable during boot-camp. When Zombie turns him over for a psych evaluation, his body is later found among the remains of other refugees.
Flintstone
Played by: Alex MacNicoll
- Death by Irony: He becomes murderously traitorous when Zombie's first mission, on which he's on, starts going south thanks to Reznik. He winds up killing himself by rebelling against Zombie's orders.
- The Resenter: He loathes Zombie beyond all reason because Reznik not only took away his squad leader title, and gave it to Zombie, for having the guts to stand up to him in Nugget's defense, but then went ahead and made Zombie Sergeant when their squad graduated boot camp.
- Schmuck Bait: He falls victim to this after Zombie explains the real situation to him. He finds himself unable to resist pushing the Big Red Button.
- The Starscream: Once he's relieved of being squad leader, and Zombie takes the post, at the orders of Reznik, Flintstone makes explicitly clear that he's going to usurp and defy Zombie at every opportunity, and second guesses every thing Zombie does, happy to jump at the chance to rub any preceived failure in Zombie's face. It gets him killed, by his own hand.
Poundcake
Played by: Nadji Jeter
One of Zombie's best shooters, before Ringer showed up. Never said a word in Reznik's boot camp.- Beware the Quiet Ones: Doesn't look like much, never talks, killed Grace, that even Evan couldn't deal with.
- Big "SHUT UP!": On the receiving end from his own mother as she succumbed to the Red Death. He never spoke again.
- Elective Mute: Poundcake doesn't talk due to his mother's last words being a Big "SHUT UP!".
- Heroic Sacrifice: Set off the CO2 detector bomb to take out Grace so the rest of the squad could escape. Of course, he was going to die soon anyway…
- My Greatest Failure: His little brother disappeared one day while he was looking for food, and his mother was confined to her bed with the Red Death.
- Taking You with Me: He got his hands on Megan's implanted CO2 detector bomb and breathed on it, killing Grace and himself.
Lisa and Olliver Sullivan
Played By: Maggie Siff and Ron Livingston
Nurse Pam
The primary nurse met in Camp Haven by any refugee children brought in.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: She looks and acts like a real nurse. Sweet, patient, kind. She's really just as cruel and sadistic as the vast majority of Silencers who are utterly genocidal.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: She somehow fails to notice the fact that Cassie has shoved a tracking implant up her nose, and ignores Cassie's warning, thus killing herself.
- Laser-Guided Karma: She deceived refugees into killing fellow survivors who stumbled on the masquerade by making the survivors push a button that would kill those in the know. She pushes a button intending to kill a surivor who caught on, and wound up killing herself.
