*Originally written August 12th, 2018*
Yeah, I didn't go into The Darkest Minds with any real expectations, aside from a generic Young Adult sci-fi affair and that's exactly what I got. I wouldn't have even seen this if I didn't have time to kill before seeing The Meg. There is so little to say about this, it's just another post Harry Potter attempt at creating a film series based on a collection of books.
There's shades of X-Men thrown in there, but it's a very generic "In a future where kids are all rounded up and kept in camps because of their newfound powers, one girl turns out to be the Chosen One and escapes to join a organisation who are fighting back". It is that cliche and it hits every single beat you'd expect. There's the tacked on romance that is completely under-baked and thrown in there just to pad the film out.
Being a film about kids who essentially have superpowers, there was obviously a lot of potential for them to do interesting things with them, it's sadly just wasted and feels like a collection of powers we've already seen in much better films. Honestly, the amount this rips off X-Men is outrageous and it just made me wish I was rewatching one of those instead of this.
At 100 minutes it feels extremely rushed, we go from place to place very quickly and while we learn a bit about the lead character, everyone else is completely wasted and just awful. I appreciate this was constricted by such a modest budget for what it is, but it really shows. There's not really any action until the final act and when we do see it, it feels very cheap and uninteresting, a lot of what is going on is lost by setting the scene at night, which I assume was intentional. I guess I was just reminded of 2015's Fantastic Four, which felt equally rushed and was a complete mess too, but this was not quite the disaster Fan4stic was.
I really hated the use of the lame, generic pop music to hammer home what you're meant to feel in every unearned scene. It was brutal. The only positive things I have to say about this are the lead actress was fine,Amandla Stenberg did a fine job with such awful material, I'm amazed she kept a straight face while spouting dialogue that had the depth of an "Inspirational" Instagram post.
The Darkest Minds is what it is, another failed attempt at trying to make a new Harry Potter or Hunger Games. It does nothing to differentiate from other films in the genre and I have no doubt this will fail to get a sequel. Not that anyone wanted one, this will be quickly forgotten and washed away before you know it.
4/10 Dans
The Darkest Minds is out now in cinemas in the UK
Watch the trailer below:
Follow us:
Twitter: @FigmentReviews
Instagram: @thesurprisingadventuresofdanb
YouTube: Figment Reviews
Letterboxd: Dan
No comments:
Post a Comment