The Darkest Minds – Review

The Darkest Minds
The Darkest Minds

Director: Jennifer Yuh Nelson

Runtime: 105 teenage mutant minutes

Watching The Darkest Minds, I knew I was not watching a good movie. I became mildly fidgety in the cinema, and started to think about why I was not enjoying it. Am I too old? Too cynical? Too pretentious? Too caffeinated? When I see films that I’m fairly sure aren’t aimed at me, I try my best to feel what the audience I am seeing it with are feeling. I didn’t detect any outrage, but I didn’t sense any elation either. “That was that” seemed to be the general consensus of the people walking out, rather hastily. The procession had that “I don’t want to be negative about my cinema-going experience because that would be pretentious” vibe to them. And it’s never a good sign when you describe a group of people as a “procession”. “How was the movie?” someone might have asked. “It was alright”, is a response I could imagine from an optimist. The Darkest Minds is the first in what I imagine are going to be a string of films based on the young adult fantasy novel series by Alexandra Bracken, unread by me. In the world she has pieced together, children begin dying off due to a virus, and the ones that are left become super-powered, their eyes conveniently shining bright with a specific colour coinciding to their superpower. Green is super-intelligence, yellow (I think) is electro-kinesis, blue is telekinesis, orange is mind control, and red is pyro-kinesis. This scares adult politicians and military men, who round up the children and put them into camps and execute the most dangerous ones (reds and oranges—maybe they just don’t like sunsets?). An orange, Ruby Daly (Amandla Stenberg), survives by using her mind control to mind control everyone into thinking that she isn’t a mind controller, and lives in a sweat-shop instead of mind-controlling her way out of it. There isn’t much that is innovative about the apparent broad strokes of Bracken’s work. To be honest, there probably isn’t much that intends to be. It’s a little bit X-Men, a little bit Power Rangers, with elements of Children of Men (2006), a sprinkle of your general young adult fantasy series tropes, some Jedi mind powers, and some inspiration from a martial arts grading system. What I am genuinely impressed with is how Bracken has pieced these influences together to create something that might be appealing to an audience that may not be too familiar with the source material, or can simply separate The Darkest Minds and its siblings from its contemporaries. Not everything needs to reinvent the colour wheel. This seems to be an exercise in mechanics, more than anything. Bracken’s material lends itself to some surprisingly dark avenues worth exploring. Unfortunately, Jennifer Yuh Nelson’s film, following Chad Hodge’s script, seems to skirt around these. The superpower you receive seems to have some sort of causal link with an individual’s intelligence. I’m not sure what sort of intelligence. Bracken may have wanted to explore ideas of intellectual elitism, but it’s not really broached at all by this film. “You really are an orange” is a slam from the super-intelligent Chubs (Skylan Brooks), who is never given anything particularly intelligent to say himself, and never gets to explain his nickname. Smarts in this movie take the form of plot device and irreverent one-liners. But there might be a point worth exploring there. Bracken’s world is also honestly violent. I appreciate that there appear to be consequences and stakes for these characters and their lives, although the violence is never given poignant weight by the film. It would have been nice to see young superheroes have to confront the reality that they are hurting people. The film doesn’t condescend to its audience by pretending they can’t handle those themes, per se, but the shockingly frank violence is never meditated upon either. The cast hold up their end well. Amandla Stenberg radiates warmth even when everything is cold around her. Actors in films adapted from young adult novels can get a lot of fan backlash. It’s hard to imagine anyone having an issue with Stenberg. Harris Dickinson plays Liam, whose name I caught half-way through the film. Is there a more appropriate name for a teenage boy in young adult fiction? Noah, perhaps? There are moments where he seems perfectly comfortable, and there are times when he seems to be a slave to the material. He’s a puppy with big paws, and it’s easy to predict to great performances out of him in the future. Patrick Gibson does a fine job doing what he needs to do as Clancy, who is not named Noah. Miya Cech got a laugh for being adorable as Zu at one point. The aforementioned Skylan Brooks got a laugh at one point too, but a lot of his one-liners fell flat, although I think that says more about Chubs than it does about Brooks. The adult cast show up and earn their paychecks. No one phones it in, but no one was swinging for the fences, just to mix metaphors. I recently had the pleasure of seeing Mission Impossible: Fallout. There is a scene where Rebecca Ferguson whizzes past pillars on a motorcycle, creating an architectural xylophone, of sorts. The sound design gets so much out of the film’s environs, and the action produces gritty noises in a rather pleasing way. In The Darkest Minds, the very powers the narrative is based around produce an inhuman and mechanical noise that is more reminiscent of nails on a chalkboard than something audiences might enjoy engaging with. When Quint draws his nails down the chalkboard in Jaws (1975), it’s designed to be diegetically displeasing. In The Darkest Minds, it is just displeasing. Not as displeasing as the soundtrack that seemingly only exists as product placement for the desired hits of the season, however. The Darkest Minds has caused me to reflect on certain questions. The convenience of the colour-coded powers made me think back to my childhood. People often ask “How did people not know that Clark Kent was Superman? He just puts on glasses”. If you go back and watch Superman (1978), Christopher Reeve’s performance does its best to make Clark Kent so sniveling and unsexy that it’s actually believable you’d never consider such a worm to be able to defy physics. My burning question as a child was always “Why do the Power Rangers always wear their designated colours outside their superhero duty?” Was Alpha-5’s primary purpose to get them all to sign contracts to ensure they were always aesthetically indicating? What purpose would that serve? Was Zordon secretly a baddy trying to get the Rangers to stand out? Why didn’t he just poison the cheese-platter at the first Ranger meeting? Why recruit them at all? Why are all the X-Men mutants’ powers useful? Why isn’t there a mutant at Charles Xavier’s school that can, say, detect the potassium levels in standard breeds of dog? If the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles mixed up blindfolds, would they be able to tell each other apart? Did they pull that with their girlfriends? Boyfriends? Is at least one of the Ninja Turtles at least a little bi-curious or non-binary? I’m wary writing this review that there might be someone that really appreciates these novels, or this film, that wants to scream at me: “You don’t get it!” You’re right, I probably don’t. I must openly admit that. I also understand how being so disconnected from material can distance a reviewer from their audience. I remember reading Roger Ebert’s review of Pokemon: The First Movie (1999, and boy was that title a little cocky). “The individual Pokemon have personalities that make the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles look like Billy Crystal” is a sentence that is forever burned into my psyche. Going back and re-reading this for my review here, I am reminded he opens with “There are times here on the movie beat when I feel like I’m plain in over my head. This is one of those times”. My aim here is to not outright claim The Darkest Minds has no value. Fans of the series should probably see it, and will probably find things to enjoy about it. To anyone that loves Bracken’s work or cherishes this film, I’m sorry. I am in over my head. I’m not green enough to get this. One of The Darkest Minds’s more egregious mistakes is one I actually admire it for. Beyond its borrowing of familiar fantasy/sci-fi/comic book concepts, it actually makes reference to some of these within the movie. There is an overt discussion about Harry Potter at one point. To remind you of franchises that you’d much rather be watching is certainly ill-advised, but it is definitely brave. If you choose to go and see The Darkest Minds, you might end up walking out talking about a bunch of other movies you preferred. Think of this as a fan letter to those films.

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