The Darkest Minds (2018)
Directed by Jennifer Yuh Nelson
After a disease kills 98% of America's children, the surviving 2% develop superpowers and are placed in internment camps. A 16-year-old girl escapes her camp and joins a group of other teens on the run from the government.
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18 films that influenced The Darkest Minds
What critics say influenced The Darkest Minds
A huge part of this is down to the excellent casting, with Stenberg (The Hunger Games, the upcoming The Hate U Give) delivering a very strong performance that promises many more excellent turns to come.
It’s the latest aspiring young adult franchise to follow in the footsteps of “The Hunger Games” and “Divergent,” though it would be a surprise if “Darkest Minds” makes it anywhere near that far.
It's hard to say how teens today will receive The Darkest Minds when The Hunger Games, Divergent, and The Maze Runner are already at their fingertips, but it is worth noting that it's refreshing to see one of these films feature a main cast predominantly consisting of people of color.
Releasing August 3 in the States and August 10 in the UK, this Fox offering will hope to cater to the same audiences that sought out The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner and Harry Potter.
Certainly, Alexandra Bracken’s The Darkest Minds, the source material for a new movie of the same title, fits in a similar dystopian category as The Hunger Games or The Maze Runner series.
Coming on the heels of The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, and countless others, it takes an exceptional entry to stand out.
Director Jennifer Yuh Nelson, who helmed two of the “Kung Fu Panda” sequels before this, takes on her first live-action feature.
Making her debut behind the live-action camera after directing the Kung Fu Panda sequels , Jennifer Yuh Nelson botches the action scenes, including a car chase so incoherently staged that it becomes difficult to track the movements of only three vehicles on a desolate stretch of road.
Still, you’d be forgiven for feeling like we’re covering old ground early on in The Darkest Minds, especially when it features such familiar story elements as “every kid gets put in a group” and it’s all very X-Men, but it’s worth sticking with because Jennifer Yuh Nelson’s (the Kung Fu Panda films) live action debut has visual imagination, energy and an awful lot of heart.
Animator (“Kung Fu Panda”) turned director Jennifer Yuh Nelson treats us to some “Maze Runner” level dystopia — a half-ruined entropic country (the story is set in Virginia), abandoned malls (No kids, no need for malls, right?), legions of locked-up kids paraded, by color, into detention camps.
Nelson, a former animator who has previously directed the Kung Fu Panda sequels, handles the gentler moments more successfully than its ugly ones; when government troops inevitably find the camp, we have to suffer through an unfortunate climax of fire and brimstone before reaching an intriguing ending.
Director Jennifer Yuh Nelson (“ Kung Fu Panda ” series) isn’t able to elevate the kids’ fight for survival above its melodramatic trappings.
So…did people stop being able to have kids after this child-specific plague hit, Children of Men-style?
Assembled in a one-from-column-A, one-from-column-B way from far better stories, Minds — based on the novel by Alexandra Bracken and the live-action debut of Kung Fu Panda 2 and 3 director Jennifer Yuh Nelson — borrows from Children of Men and X-Men , among other fanciful properties, without any interest in actually examining the ideas it steals.
Plot-wise, it’s about 40 percent X-Men, and 35 percent each of The Hunger Games and Children of Men—only without a hint of what made those movies work.
Scenes of kids in camps and a late shot referencing Triumph of the Will are supposed to be enough to provide the emotional and moral weight that the scriptwriters forgot to include in their drafts.
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Call it The Golden Compass rule: No multi-part movie series should be started without a reasonable certainty that the story will be told in full.
The final image of the movie — a child’s hand held high in warring defiance of a villain we still don’t quite understand — isn’t so much a cliff-hanger as a “dot dot dot” for a sequel that will never get made, trailing off into the dustbin alongside such open-ended fantasy movies as “City of Ember,” “Ender’s Game,” and “The Golden Compass.”
It’s also apparent that the study and the filmmakers were hoping their film would be the start of another popular YA fantasy series, ending things on a cliffhanger that, while not as annoying as the one in that first Maze Runner or 2009’s Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant proved to be, is still rather obnoxious and unsatisfactory.
The director of this movie is Jennifer Yuh Nelson who is primarily an animation director (“Kung Fu Panda 2”, “Kung Fu Panda 3”) and story artist (“Kung Fu Panda”, “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron”, “Madagascar”) at Dreamworks animation and this is her live action directorial debut.
The live-action directing debut of Jennifer Yuh Nelson (Kung Fu Panda 2 and 3), The Darkest Minds is the latest attempt at a young-adult dystopian sci-fi franchise.
The director, Jennifer Yuh Nelson (“Kung Fu Panda 2,” “Kung Fu Panda 3”), keeps the pace fast and the exposition flowing; the movie is almost comfortingly watchable.
But the horrifying reality of our day-to-day world is not novelist Alexandra Bracken’s point, nor is it the point of screenwriter Chad Hodge or director Jennifer Yuh Nelson (Kung Fu Panda 2 & 3).
Nelson (who directed Kung Fu Panda 2 and co-directed Kung Fu Panda 3) gives The Darkest Minds all the requisite gloomy grandeur, presenting a crumbling world thrust into chaos and paranoia.
Assembled in a one-from-column-A, one-from-column-B way from far better stories, Minds — based on the novel by Alexandra Bracken and the live-action debut of Kung Fu Panda 2 and 3 director Jennifer Yuh Nelson — borrows from Children of Men and X-Men , among other fanciful properties, without any interest in actually examining the ideas it steals.
Her direction here reminds me so heavily of when Andrew Stanton (“Finding Nemo”, “Wall-E”) ventured into directing live action with “John Carter” but the script was so damn bad that the movie left a negative mark on his name.
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The director of this movie is Jennifer Yuh Nelson who is primarily an animation director (“Kung Fu Panda 2”, “Kung Fu Panda 3”) and story artist (“Kung Fu Panda”, “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron”, “Madagascar”) at Dreamworks animation and this is her live action directorial debut.
Tampoco ayuda que Gwendoline Christie, Brienne en Game of Thrones y malvada en los dos nuevos episodios de la saga de Star Wars deambule por los escenarios.