‘Darkest Minds’ starts with intriguing premise, but then takes it nowhere
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 and are beaten, burned alive, hunted and interned for their powers, which are helpfully color-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 setup for some future installment.
The film speeds through a jumble of exposition setting up a world in which most of the children die suddenly and the 2 percent who remain develop said special powers. The U.S. 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 labor camps.
Ruby (Amandla Stenberg) is our entry into this world. She’s an “orange,” the second most dangerous color, but survives by mindcontrolling the screeners into thinking she’s “green,” or the smart ones. The stereotypically sinister military guys 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 (Mandy Moore) helps her escape before that.
This first 30 or so minutes is 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.
There’s quite a lot of filler and half-baked 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 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 to go home. It’s a bizarre little diversion with no satisfying reveal.
There are appealing things about this movie, like Stenberg, who does wonders with what she’s given to work with, and her chemistry with Dickinson.
But as the whole dystopian YA 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.