The Darkest Minds: Film Review

The Darkest Minds: Film Review

Cast: Amandla Stenberg, Harris Dickinson, Skylan Brooks, Gwendoline Christie
Director: Jennifer Yuh Nelson

Take a pinch of Young Adult, a snip of The Host, a snifter of The Hunger Games, sprinkle liberally with a shoe-horned romance, mix in some young X-Men, drop in some elements of Avengers: Infinity War, top with a hint of everything-you've-seen-before-in-this-genre and you've got new film The Darkest Minds.

Set six years after children mysteriously started dying and survivors were considered worthy only of rounding up and putting in camps, The Darkest Minds stars Stenberg as Ruby, a teenager who's broken out of a camp, thanks to the help of a mysterious doctor (Mandy Moore).

But unsure whether to trust her, Ruby ends up on the run with conveniently-nearby-hidden-kids Zu (who can control electricity), Liam (telekinesis to go with wooden good looks) and brainy Chubs (looks like a Fresh Prince cum Dope extra).

Searching for a utopia for the children who survived, Ruby and the gang are hunted from all quarters.

Frustratingly, The Darkest Minds has some potential.

Complete with a soundtrack clearly aimed at its audience of YA readers, and adapted from a book by Alexandra Bracken, it knows what it wants to do - even if it feels like a patchwork mesh of every YA film you've ever seen. (Those for those exposed to it for the first time, it could become something,
thanks to its diverse leading cast).

But rushing through dramatic edges, shoehorning narrative elements in and giving them nary a second to breathe or dispatching them with a laissez-faire approach does little to build this first outing into any kind of franchise.

It's even worse with the cursory way threats are tossed aside, having built them up to be something substantial. Matters are not helped by an obvious villain and some truly wooden acting when emotional clashes come to the fore.

Perhaps the greatest crime of the YA mesh with X-Men is how the film doesn't really resolve itself, preferring to dangle narrative elements for potential sequels and leaving to a feeling of frustration in the film's denouement, where poignancy and emotional heft should have done the heavy lifting.

There's potential for darkness here, and perhaps the target teen audience would have appreciated some truth (shots of kids being executed are truly chilling) but rather than build dystopia, The Darkest Minds is content solely to play it too safe to be relevant or compelling.