TOTAL LACK OF THOUGHT
Young adult hodgepodge TheDarkestMinds is thoroughly underwhelming and frustratingly incomplete
Kids under the age of 18 are being persecuted by adults for their special powers in The Darkest Minds, an adaptation of book one of Alexandra Bracken’s young adult trilogy that’s about five years and 15 movie dystopias too late to feel the least bit fresh or interesting.
And it’s not for lack of trying. Director Jennifer Yuh Nelson ( Kung Fu Panda 2) brings a heart-pounding intensity to the deeply disturbing story in her live-action debut. Children die, are beaten, burnt alive, hunted and interned for their powers, which are helpfully colour-coded by their glowing eyes and can essentially range from super smart to Jedi to fire-breather. But the story is not only derivative of so many other dystopias and kids with power sagas, but, and perhaps worst of all, it never even really gets going — a clear and infuriating set up for some future instalment. The film speeds through a jumble of exposition setting up a world in which most of the children die suddenly and the 2% who remain develop said special powers. The US President (Bradley Whitford), afraid of tots and teens capable of mind control and telekinesis even though he’s also father to one, dispatches his military to round them up, execute the most dangerous, and force the rest into servitude in labour camps.
Ruby (Amandla Stenberg) is our entry into this world. She’s an “orange”, the second most dangerous colour, but survives by mind-controlling the screeners into thinking she’s “green”, or one of the smart ones. The stereotypically sinister military guys (like Wade Williams’ “The Captain’’) running the camp she’s in are suspicious and decide to stage a test to figure out what she really is, but a kindly nurse at the camp, Cate (Mandy Moore), helps her escape before that.
This first 30 or so minutes are actually fairly riveting with interesting action and tension as we all get acclimated to this strange world, but soon it becomes clear that this story has no intention of actually going anywhere, in this movie at least.
Ruby hooks up with a little squad of runaways, the silent, electricity-wielding Zu (Miya Cech), the smart Chubs (Skylan Brooks) and the oh-so-obvious love interest Liam (Harris Dickinson) as they search for a paradise camp they’ve heard of that’s run by another escaped kid. There are obstacles along the way — Ruby is afraid to let her new friends know her true colour, there’s a psycho bounty hunter on their tail in Lady Jane (Gwendoline Christie) and a lot of cagey little cliques of kids unwilling to help.
There’s also quite a lot of filler and halfbaked story lines and underdeveloped ideas that leave this whole exercise feeling stilted and not quite finished. We don’t know very much about Ruby, but what we do know is that the night she turned 10 and her parents gave her a Gudetama keychain, her eyes glowed orange and the next morning her mother didn’t remember who she was. And yet at 16, when she escapes the camp, all she wants to do is go home. It’s a bizarre little diversion with no satisfying reveal — did she forget that her mom forgot her? Did she think it changed?
The film is full of little annoyances like that, which — and this is assuming the very best — may ultimately have more satisfying conclusions somewhere down the line that fans of the books get to know and the rest of us just get to guess at. Among the few appealing things about this movie is Stenberg, who does wonders with what she’s given to work with, as well as her chemistry with Dickinson.
But as the whole dystopian young adult genre looks for a way to evolve, this concept of set-up movies really needs to die. Derivative is excusable, a half story is not.
Soon it becomes clear that this story has no intention of actually going anywhere, in this movie at least