After a couple of intriguing trailers, audiences may have been excited to see Fox's dystopian sci-fi thriller The Darkest Minds, based on the young-adult novel by Alexandra Bracken. Directed by Jennifer Yuh Nelson, the film follows Ruby (Amandla Stenberg), a super-powered teenager on the run from a government that placed her and other mysteriously superhuman kids like her in interment camps.
It's an interesting concept on paper, to be sure, even if it's undeniably familiar. The film arrived today in theaters nationwide, and critics -- to put it lightly -- did not enjoy it: The Darkest Minds debuted on Rotten Tomatoes with an abysmal score of 15 percent (that's since ticked up to 21 percent). For those who had high hopes for the film, that's definitely not a pretty sight.
REVIEW: The Darkest Minds Is a Violent, Predictable Patchwork of Better Movies
Let's start with what one of our own reviewers had to say:
Alexandra August, CBR: "The Darkest Minds seeks to capitalize on the YA dystopian market by stripping other franchises of their key elements and then tossing in violence for shock value to make up for its utter lack of originality. The result is discomfiting at best and offensive at worst."
Other critics felt similarly, and likened the film to older novel-based franchises that you might find some of your friends still teasing others for enjoying, or even just watching.
Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle: "Ruby is the member of a powerful but feared and oppressed minority, just like Shailene Woodley in “Divergent.” And remember how, in “Twilight,” Robert Pattinson was always worried that, if he ever kissed Kristen Stewart, his vampire nature would take over and she’d soon look like a squeezed lemon? Well, in “The Darkest Minds,” Ruby is afraid to kiss her dashing would-be boyfriend, Liam (Harris Dickinson), for fear that, if she were to touch him, she would do something to his brain. It’s illustrative of the difference between grade-A trash and grade-Z trash that in Twilight, the possible consequence of kissing are cataclysmic, vivid and easy to dread, while in The Darkest Minds, they are vague, internal and nothing you can really picture. The movie is 105 minutes long but seems about 45 minutes longer, with uneventful stretches and at least three sections where the action stops for musical interludes featuring goopy pop music. [...] here’s a wild guess: This is the last you’ll be hearing about The Darkest Minds."
Evidently, the film doesn't only borrow from other YA stories. The way some critics tell it, you'd think the entire story was put together as if from a huge sci-fi fan who wanted to write their own crossover fan fiction.
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Peter Debruge, Variety: "this relatively intense adolescent-focused action movie borrows nearly all its ingredients from other popular sci-fi franchises — from “X-Men” to “Stranger Things” — and doesn’t much seem to mind if kids recognize how derivative it is (at one point, the two romantic leads talk about how they feel like characters in a Harry Potter movie)."
It's difficult to adapt a lengthy novel to film. If an adaptation is done well, each chapter will transition seamlessly into the next, and you won't notice any of the issues the screenwriters might have had. Well, critics noticed here.
Germain Lussier, io9: "If you sat down to watch The Darkest Minds without knowing it was based on a book, that information would become abundantly clear about 10 minutes into the film. Almost every scene, especially early on, feels slightly detached from the last, as if some cohesive thread was cut to squeeze a 500-page book into a 100-minute movie—which, if we’re being honest, is almost certainly the case. The result is an interesting, beautiful-looking movie that gets increasingly frustrating as plot lines are left in the dust, relationships are forced together, and surprises are clearly telegraphed."
It doesn't help those screenwriting issues when you need to appease your investors and you can't do it subtly.
Dana Schwartz, Entertainment Weekly: "the dialogue is so generic and characters so two-dimensional it feels as though this film has contempt for its audiences. Product placement means we get several beauty shots of the children’s van’s Nissan logo, as tender and lingering as anything that transpires between the young lovers. At one point, a line of dialogue includes the phrase, “Nissan mini-van,” which is likely to elicit a scoff of laughter in a theater near you[...]What we’re left with is a Mad-Libs version of a dystopian YA adaptation done by someone who saw half of an X-Men movie on TV once, with no depth, no new ideas, and no point."
All in all, it seems like the film is simply a mishmash of tropes and young adult elements borrowed from other franchises that the film rushes through at breakneck speeds.
Jake Cole, Slant Magazine: "the film shifts from a focused, coherent vision of generational terror and oppression into a grab bag of lazily compiled genre tropes. The characters are rushed through the process of introduction and familiarization and its attendant snags, with Ruby going from a suspicious new member of the party to a trusted friend and confidante in the space of about 24 hours. The plot sprints past potentially involving character drama, while the seeds of romance between Ruby and Liam are lugubriously sown thanks to the YA genre's propensity for leaning hard on characters' unconsummated passions."
Based on the book by Alexandra Bracken, director Jennifer Yuh Nelson’s The Darkest Minds stars Amandla Stenberg, Mandy Moore, Gwendoline Christie, Harris Dickinson, Skylan Brooks, Miya Cech, Patrick Gibson, Golden Brooks, Wallace Langham and Bradley Whitford. The film is in theaters nationwide.