The Darkest Minds (12A.)
Directed by Jennifer Yul Nelson.
Starring Amandla Stenberg, Harris Dickinson, Skylan Brooks, Miya Cech, Mandy Moore, Gwendoline Christie and Bradley Whitford. 104 mins
Fiction writing is an increasingly tough game to squeeze a penny from. For adults, it's all thrillers and crime dramas and even then you have to stand in line behind every politician who ever got a brief wisp of power. The other potentially lucrative alternative is doing it for the kids, the young adults, the YaYas. J.K Rowling didn't just get children reading, she got them reading any old rubbish. But you're going to need a cast iron pseudonym for this racket because you check your dignity in at reception when you enter this racket.
The YaYas will suck up any scenario that makes them feel both special and different: oh, I'm a wizard and my life is so hard; oh, I'm a vampire and my life is so hard; oh, I'm running in a maze and my life is so hard, but no one understands. You basically have to re-write Eddie Cochran's Summertime Blues as a sci-fi dystopia. But even by the standards of YaYa fiction, Alexandra Bracken's Darkest Minds trilogy excels at pandering to teenager's sense of self-pity: it's a future where all the kids that haven't been killed off by a mysterious plague are put in prison camps by the adults, afraid of the strange new X-Men style powers the survivors have acquired. The camps are supposed to be treating them but there ain't no cure for the X-kid mutant power.
An essential part of YaYa fiction is compartmentalisation: the houses at Hogwarts, the factions in Divergent. Here the X-kids's mutant powers are colour coded, from green to red, with red being the most powerful. Our heroine Ruby (Stenberg) is orange which means that she is a Yoda, with just a trace of Thanos. She escapes from a camp and joins up with a group of kids driving around a derelict, deserted America in search of a special land where the kids are free. A few grown-ups pop in for cameos – Gwendoline Christie as a bounty hunter, Bradley Whitford as the president, Mandy Moore as the one who just wants to help – but it is about the kids. "We're family; a dysfunctional family but it's as good as you're gonna get."
The plot runs the gamut from bull to sh** and I can only imagine the falseness of Nelson's enthusiasm when this was offered to her as reward for directing the last two Kung Fu Panda films. The cast isn't anything special but Stenberg, who was something in The Hunger Games, could be capable of doing some thing special in a better role. Her face and eyes have an expressiveness that is similar to Chiwetel Ejiofor and she can chuck down a single tear like few others; no sooner is it quivering on her lower eyelid then it is halfway over her cheek.
Directed by Jennifer Yul Nelson.
Starring Amandla Stenberg, Harris Dickinson, Skylan Brooks, Miya Cech, Mandy Moore, Gwendoline Christie and Bradley Whitford. 104 mins
Fiction writing is an increasingly tough game to squeeze a penny from. For adults, it's all thrillers and crime dramas and even then you have to stand in line behind every politician who ever got a brief wisp of power. The other potentially lucrative alternative is doing it for the kids, the young adults, the YaYas. J.K Rowling didn't just get children reading, she got them reading any old rubbish. But you're going to need a cast iron pseudonym for this racket because you check your dignity in at reception when you enter this racket.
The YaYas will suck up any scenario that makes them feel both special and different: oh, I'm a wizard and my life is so hard; oh, I'm a vampire and my life is so hard; oh, I'm running in a maze and my life is so hard, but no one understands. You basically have to re-write Eddie Cochran's Summertime Blues as a sci-fi dystopia. But even by the standards of YaYa fiction, Alexandra Bracken's Darkest Minds trilogy excels at pandering to teenager's sense of self-pity: it's a future where all the kids that haven't been killed off by a mysterious plague are put in prison camps by the adults, afraid of the strange new X-Men style powers the survivors have acquired. The camps are supposed to be treating them but there ain't no cure for the X-kid mutant power.
An essential part of YaYa fiction is compartmentalisation: the houses at Hogwarts, the factions in Divergent. Here the X-kids's mutant powers are colour coded, from green to red, with red being the most powerful. Our heroine Ruby (Stenberg) is orange which means that she is a Yoda, with just a trace of Thanos. She escapes from a camp and joins up with a group of kids driving around a derelict, deserted America in search of a special land where the kids are free. A few grown-ups pop in for cameos – Gwendoline Christie as a bounty hunter, Bradley Whitford as the president, Mandy Moore as the one who just wants to help – but it is about the kids. "We're family; a dysfunctional family but it's as good as you're gonna get."
The plot runs the gamut from bull to sh** and I can only imagine the falseness of Nelson's enthusiasm when this was offered to her as reward for directing the last two Kung Fu Panda films. The cast isn't anything special but Stenberg, who was something in The Hunger Games, could be capable of doing some thing special in a better role. Her face and eyes have an expressiveness that is similar to Chiwetel Ejiofor and she can chuck down a single tear like few others; no sooner is it quivering on her lower eyelid then it is halfway over her cheek.
