The Darkest Minds (2018)

The Darkest Minds arrives as a young adult dystopia assembled from spare parts, and it carries itself with the wounded dignity of a franchise that will not be getting a second installment. Jennifer Yuh Nelson, making her live action debut after Kung Fu Panda, directs with competence and little urgency. The premise, a plague that kills most of America's children and leaves the survivors with color coded powers, is dutifully explained and then largely abandoned in favor of running through woods. The film grossed $41 million against a $34 million budget and was pulled from 2,679 theaters in its third weekend, the largest such retreat in recorded history. The ledger is not kind.

On the question of social consciousness, the film is a modest and somewhat conflicted specimen. Amandla Stenberg anchors the cast as Ruby, and the supporting players include Skylan Brooks, Miya Cech and Golden Brooks, an ensemble that reflects the demographics of its intended audience without ever announcing itself as a statement. Race goes unmentioned in the internment camps, which is either a quiet grace or an oversight depending on the viewer's patience. The government that hunts these children is authoritarian, not corporate, so the economic critique never materializes. There is no queer presence, no environmental lament, no engagement with bodily difference, no attention to neurodivergence. The film is a dystopia with a narrow imagination.

What remains is a female protagonist and a female director, both worth a nod, and neither amounting to an argument. Ruby's powers are treated as a curse of intimacy, a girl who cannot touch the boy she loves, which is romance rather than politics. Critics found the whole enterprise thin, and one reviewer suggested it played more like a manifesto than a thriller, though the manifesto in question is mostly about curfews and trust. The film gestures at a broken society and then sprints past the wreckage toward a sequel it will never receive. We are left with a competent, forgettable adaptation of a novel that a great many teenagers loved, and a classification that will not trouble anyone's conscience.