The Darkest Minds (Review)

So, The Darkest Minds is X-Men But Bad?

I’ll admit I didn’t have high hopes walking into The Darkest Minds and yet, I still feel disappointed. The film is essentially a rip off of the X-Men franchise, except it’s really bad. I’m talking worse than X-Men Origins: Wolverine bad. Well, that might be a little harsh. It’s at least worse than that Brett Ratner fiasco, X-Men: The Last Stand.

Essentially, The Darkest Minds is a movie about a revolution for kids by kids, and with that comes an absurd number of cliches and a total disregard for logic. Not only that but a lot of the kids in here are just plain creepy (as in abuse their powers to send you off to the cornfield creepy) It’s a heavy-handed mess that has no idea what makes young adult novels so appealing to kids and adults alike. The only thing it succeeds in is ripping off bigger and better franchises.

The film takes place in a dystopian future where children somehow get a virus that gives them superpowers by enhancing parts of their brains. Sounds pretty cool, right? Well, that’s where the “cool” ends. It turns out the kids are separated into different groups based on the 5 powers they can get. The powers include enhanced intelligence (ok, makes sense), telekinesis (that’s a mind power), telepathy (definitely a brain power), control and manipulation of electricity (wait…), and fire breath (hold on, that don’t make a lick of sense). The Darkest Minds starts by trying to tug at the audience’s heartstrings by showing these poor children rounded up into camps. The thing is that in the first five minutes one of these kids forces a woman to commit suicide after he tries to escape. Needless to say, this plants the seeds that maybe the parents are doing the right thing by locking away people who can’t control powers that could lead to, say, mass murder.

That’s all nitpicking though, right? Well, it doesn’t stop there because it becomes very clear that The Darkest Minds greatest weakness is logic. The hero of the story is Ruby, played by Amandla Stenberg who you might remember as Rue from The Hunger Games. She’s come a long way from a notable plot device to full-on Young Adult adaptation lead. Her character is one of those rare oranges with telepathic powers and all she wants is her freedom. The thing is that the very first thing she does with her powers is erasing herself from her parent’s memories. Already, that pretty messed up. Not for her, but for her actual victims. She manages to escape the camps and goes on the lamb with a lot of other underdeveloped characters played by Harris Dickinson, Miya Cech, and Skylan Brooks. I would go into more about their character growth and budding relationships with each other, but if The Darkest Minds doesn’t really care about all that then why should I?

Jennifer Yuh Nelson makes the jump from animated movies about fighting animals to the young adult genre with The Darkest Minds. The issue is that she’s given a terrible script by Chad Hodge (I never trust a guy named “Chad”). The characters are disturbingly one dimensional and the whole film has the subtle nuance of a 5-year-old throwing a tantrum in a Walmart. There is no ethical gray in The Darkest Minds. It takes an approach that all children must be good and don’t deserve to be locked up despite for at least having powers that pose a very real threat. Normally I wouldn’t condone this, because it goes against those noble lessons we learned in X-Men. The thing is that our actual hero goes on to force multiple people to straight up kill themselves. After seeing that, it’s really hard to sympathize with her at all. Of course, it doesn’t help that The Darkest Minds seems to be constantly scrambling to get to the credits at a breakneck pace. It glosses over the one thing that makes young adult movies good and that’s focusing on the growth of the characters. Growing up is hard to do, but not as hard as making a halfway decent movie apparently.

For a film that features characters with “super intelligence” The Darkest Minds sure is stupid. At the core of this is their search for a society of kids that live in peace somewhere out in the woods. Meanwhile, I’m wondering how far America has fallen where it’s difficult for them to track kids with say drones or satellites or, I dunno, THE ARMY. Not to mention this group is lead by the legendary “Slip Kid” who escaped from the kiddie camps 4 times. While they see him as someone who is awesome for managing to get away so many times, I see him as someone who sucks so much that they got caught 4 times. Not exactly the kind of guy I want on my team if I’m on the lamb. However, the dumbest thing The Darkest Minds does is make an extended reference to a better Young Adult adaptation. Not only that, but even the reference is pretty bad.

The Darkest Minds might be one of the worst movies I’ve seen this summer. It’s boring, has terrible storytelling, and characters that I actually wanted to see get shot in the face. There’s no reason to support these kids and their cause, especially when they throw tantrums over everything that happens to them. It rips off concepts from franchises like Star Wars and The X-Men in ways that will make you roll your eyes in disgust. Worst of all this though is just how obvious everything is. I might not be super-smart, but even I saw the twists coming a mile away. I guess you could say that the real villain of The Darkest Minds is Captain Obvious. There are no redeeming qualities in this film other than the fact that Amandla Stenberg has proven that she’s an actress ready for the big time. I liked her much more as a person than I liked her character. The rest of it is just bad. Now, I like bad movies as much as everyone, but this is not the “so bad it’s good” that I’ve been known to enjoy in the past. It’s just so bad it’s embarrassing