"If you're one of us, come find us." This is The Darkest Minds. This dystopian science fiction thriller film directed by Jennifer Yuh Nelson, adapted by Chad Hodge, and based on Alexandra Bracken's young adult novel of the same name. When teens mysteriously develop powerful new abilities, they are declared a threat by the government and detained. Sixteen-year-old Ruby, one of the most powerful young people anyone has encountered, escapes her camp and joins a group of runaway teens seeking safe haven. Soon this newfound family realizes that, in a world in which the adults in power have betrayed them, running is not enough and they must wage a resistance, using their collective power to take back control of their future.
In mid September 2014, it was announced that 20th Century Fox had bought the film rights to Bracken's young adult novel, the first book in her The Darkest Minds series, with Hodge hired the adapt it. In mid July 2016, it was reported that animation director Jennifer Yuh Nelson had been hired to direct the film, and it would be her first live-action project. In late September, Amandla Stenberg was cast to play the lead role of Ruby Daly. By April 2017, Harris Dickinson, Mandy Moore, Bradley Whitford, Gwendoline Christie, Miya Cech, Skylan Brooks, and Patrick Gibson. Around the same time, principal photography commenced, and took place in Atlanta, Georgia.
The film stars Stenberg, Dickinson, Moore, Whitford, Christie, Cech, Brooks, and Gibson. The cast add personality and physicality to the limp script they're acting out. Sternberg makes for more than uncertain enough of a hero to add detail and meaning to the implosion of this world. There's little artifice to her performance, and the mundane honesty of her reactions create a believability that the world would otherwise lack. However, Sternberg's like a walking empathy battery, wide-open emotionally, easy to read and enormously appealing. Dickinson manages the considerable accomplishment of seeming like a real grown-up man. He makes the character's transformation from hardass to collaborator seem natural, if inevitable. Dickinson is incredibly natural onscreen. Ultimately, the cast tried valiantly to save the day, but the performances, like the film, is chock-full of holes at times.
Unlike the Harry Potter series' tangible, fully dimensional Hogwarts or The Hunger Games' colorfully variegated districts, The Darkest Minds' vision of an unknown dystopian future doesn't have much to distinguish it from a standard-issue post-apocalyptic pic. At least The Hunger Games spawned two terrific movies and a breakthrough star in Jennifer Lawrence. Onscreen, the film ignites only indifference. With an adherence to YA formula that undercuts its individualistic message, the film opens its planned trilogy in disappointingly predictable fashion. The film has great ideas and some terrific character work, but it's given such uneven attention, alternately languished upon and glossed over. The film is more interesting than the average bad movie precisely because it so gratuitously, and even thematically, fails to fit together. The film is simply a plodding and generic dystopian drama.
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