David Pierdomenico
As rumors circulate about Fox ultimately cancelling the releases of New Mutants and Dark Phoenix, the closest thing audiences will get is The Darkest Minds. Adapted from the first novel in Alexandra Bracken’s series, it can’t help but hit all the same beats and clichés as its literary and cinematic predecessors.
All Too Familiar
The film opens with a plague that wipes out 90% of children in the world. Those 10% that survive develop abilities. From there our main character Ruby (Amandla Stenberg) is carted off to a camp for children where they are sorted based on their colors, which represent powers. Greens are hyper-intelligent, blues are telekinetic, golds can manipulate electricity, and reds and oranges are deemed too powerful to be kept alive.
Ruby, an orange, successfully hides herself as a green for six years and works in the camps, in a sort of sweatshop, making boots for soldiers. One would think that a dystopian government with super intelligent children would put them to use solving quantum physics, or making nuclear weapons or energy, but for whatever reason the camp decides to use them for monotonous manual labor.
From there, Ruby escapes, and the following events transpire: she meets up with a group of runaways like her, they go to a “sanctuary” run by a charismatic leader who turns out to have a hidden agenda, and there’s a final confrontation/battle which sets up a sequel. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it also describes other series such as The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Maze Runner, as well as the one off X-Men ripoff known as Push from 2009 (it was mostly forgotten but it stars Chris Evans two years before he was Cap). And given the fact that the novels were being released at the same time as these other films were, it’s hard for the source material to deny just how derivative it is.
Missed Opportunities
Despite the plot feeling completely recycled, it’s far from the most frustrating aspect. There’s a throwaway line by Dr. Connor (Mandy Moore) about how in the six years since the plague, most adults have moved to the cities in a world without children. This one line opens up a genuinely interesting concept of what that world might look like. Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 masterpiece Children of Men focused entirely on that subject. So it begs the question why this is never further explored in The Darkest Minds. They also never address whether adults are still having babies during that time, or if they are able to. Doing so would have helped separate it from being just like every other YA adaptation.
Instead, the film decides to focus on dividing its children/teens into their respective color groups. Why does it seem like all YA Fiction is so preoccupied with this? Whether it’s the districts from Hunger Games, or the factions from Divergent, the genre seems to thrive off of sorting people. Perhaps they’re all trying to mimic the success of Harry Potter, which did the same thing with the four houses at Hogwarts. Or it could be an appeal to teenagers’ desire to be accepted into social groups or cliques, especially considering that teens are their primary target audience.
The Next Big Franchise?
20th Century Fox would love to have a new successful franchise on their hands, especially after ceding X-Men and Fantastic Four back to Marvel. However it seems unlikely. Maybe if The Darkest Minds had been released five years ago or so, it would have benefited from the plethora of YA fever, which now seems to be subsiding. The Maze Runner: The Death Cure (also produced by Fox) managed to end its series with a $288 million box office haul earlier this year, and that’s probably what the studio had in mind when they produced Darkest Minds.
But the success of Mockingjay Part 2 was three years ago, and Allegiant barely made its production budget back, resulting in the Divergent series never getting its finale. It simply seems that trends are changing and it’s not currently the right time to be starting a new franchise like this. And given the recent acquisition into Disney, 20th Century Fox has many other pressing matters on its mind. So the most likely outcome is that The Darkest Minds will just be another forgotten attempt to build a new film series.
