Been there, done that
Not another teenage melodrama, please — we’re not sure we can take it anymore
Hollywood: Please stop adapting dystopian YA novels. Just stop. I can’t even tell them apart anymore. The earliest YA franchises (Harry Potter, The Hunger Games) had distinct world-building and trendsetting qualities that unfortunately led to a proliferation of copycats: Divergent, Maze Runner, and now, the insipid The Darkest Minds trilogy, in which children develop strange superpowers and thereby must escape the scary world of adults who want to control them.
A metaphor about adolescent rebellion and the fear of growing up, you say? How quaint.
The Darkest Minds has got everything you’ve been looking for in a YA trilogy — or, more accurately, everything you’ve already seen. Post-apocalyptic setting ? Check. Children and teens treated poorly by adults for some systemic reason or another? Check. Hero’s journey narrative? Check. Superpowers? Check. Houses, colours, camps, blocks, or some other arbitrary means to distinguish kids from each other? Check. Total lack of imagination? Check.
The Darkest Minds isn’t even trying: The arbitrary system categorizing kids is based on the most primitive system we learn when we are all but children — colour. Oranges can control minds, which is what 16-yearold protagonist, Ruby Daly
(Amandla Stenberg), can do, and Reds breathe fire. Only Greens, Blues and Yellows, who have less harmful abilities like telekinesis and control over electricity, are allowed to remain alive. Ruby manages to escape a child prison anyway and serendipitously finds a family of other teen deserters. Liam (Harris Dickinson), Chubs (Skylan Brooks) and Zu (Miya Cech) survive in a touring hippie van and take care of each other because no one else will.
Their discovery of Edo, a safe space for other kids with superpowers, doesn’t go as well as planned when the foursome discover the secret motives of the camp run by another Orange, Clancy Gray (Patrick Gibson), putting the group on the run once again, trying to escape bounty hunters and some adult rebellion group led by Mandy Moore, who plays a camp nurse.
The film does so little to build any purpose behind the kids’ mysterious powers that their implementation is poorly designed plot points begging to be torn apart.
For example, if Oranges can control others’ minds, how could they possibly be contained or even stopped and killed in the first place? That kind of power has such an explicit degree of invincibility that it requires a fair bit of world-building to ensure the narrative’s internal logic (see: X-Men).
Here, everything is rushed through, including Ruby’s close friendship with Clancy, who understands her on a level Liam simply cannot.
When that friendship quickly sours — for serious reasons the film spends far too little time exploring — the story verges on a kind of teenage melodrama made all the more absurd by the presence of their superpowers. Speaking of which: Why are the other colours deemed harmless? The telekinetic kids are just as capable of wreaking fatal havoc (Liam flattens a bunch of Reds in one go by dropping a dumpster on top of them). And, if the number of kids at Edo is any indication, many of them are capable of escaping the prisons. The Darkest Minds is not interested in fleshing out the details of its constructed world and, as a result, it becomes increasingly difficult to digest the story or characters.
Ruby’s romantic entanglements are also unintentionally silly and, to some degree, problematic: Whenever she stands up to Liam, all he has to do is physically force her back through telekinesis! The closest the film gets to resembling the turbulence of teenage tribulations is including that real-life physical power imbalance between men and women, but it’s also for no real purpose.
It’s this lack of thoughtfulness that should have kept The Darkest Minds on the never-ending stack of other unimaginative, copycat YA screenplays, never to be greenlit.