The Darkest Minds (2018)

Directed by: Jennifer Yuh Nelson | 104 minutes | science fiction thriller | Actors: Amandla Stenberg, Mandy Moore, Bradley Whitford, Harris Dickinson, Gwendoline Christie, Miya Cech, Patrick Gibson, Makenzie Collier, Mark O’Brien, Wade Williams, Golden Brooks, Wallace Langham, Skylan Brooks, Jordan Salmon, Catherine Dyer, Peyton Wich

The ‘young adult’ genre is actually already passé. ‘Twilight’, ‘The Hunger Games’ and ‘Divergent’ once drew full houses, but the cinema-goer seems already tired of the combination of teenage drama and post-apocalyptic worlds. From director Jennifer Yuh Nelson (“Kung Fu Panda”) to the book by Alexandra Bracken, The Darkest Minds tries to give it a new twist by giving the main characters superpowers. After all, superheroes are hot. Unfortunately ‘The Darkest Minds’ doesn’t give the genre the much-needed boost.

After 90% of the children die of a mysterious illness, the remaining 10% develop superpowers ranging from mind reading to telekinesis and the manipulation of fire. The government fears them and locks them up in camps. They are classified into five categories according to their powers: from the relatively harmless Green and Blue to the dangerous Gold and Orange, culminating in the very dangerous Red. The film follows Ruby Daly (Amandla Stenberg), who is classified as Green, but is secretly Orange. This makes her special, because everyone else in her camp is either Green or Blue. It’s the genre’s most famous cliché: teenagers finding out they’re ‘special’. Together with the beautiful Liam (Harris Dickinson) and a group of other children, she escapes and joins the resistance against the camps.

Herein lies the biggest weakness of ‘The Darkest Minds’ – the story is nothing we haven’t seen before. Once again, we follow a teenager in a dystopian future who finds out she’s “special” and becomes an important figure in the resistance against the dictatorship in which she lives. Oh, and she falls in love too. This description could have been used in exactly the same wording for any other young adult film. ‘The Darkest Minds’ tries to impress with superpowers, but to no avail. We already know people with superpowers who are persecuted for this from the ‘X-Men’ series, which does this much better. We don’t run into any major surprises along the way either – the plot twists that do exist are predictable. The young cast, supplemented by well-known names such as Gwendoline Christie (‘Game of Thrones’) and Bradley Whitford (as president, in a nice nod to ‘The West Wing’), does its best, but unfortunately can’t make the unoriginal story more interesting .

‘The Darkest Mind’ is probably fun entertainment for lovers of the book and the genre, but offers nothing new for those who have had it with the ‘young adult’ film adaptations. That even superpowers – elsewhere guarantee top popcorn entertainment – ​​are unable to take the film to a higher level is a sign that post-apocalyptic teen drama is really done for now.