The Darkest Minds - Fortunately, our children are not like that

Cinema Wednesdays - Nicolas Jutzet

The film by Jennifer Yuh Nelson - known as the director of Kung Fu Panda 2 and 3 - is science fiction. In a future world, children and teenagers begin to undergo strange transformations that force the State, embodied by a President who wishes to react to the situation «outside any political logic, it's about our children, our future», to react. The situation is serious, and even his own son is affected. 

As a result, children are placed in camps, or even exterminated if their degree of dangerousness is deemed excessive. A good opportunity to remind ourselves of François Mitterrand: «If youth isn't always right, the society that ignores and punishes it is always wrong». We classify the new generation in colorful categories. The reds and oranges are too dangerous; the state gets rid of them. The rest are framed, monitored and violently directed. The circulating virus grants variable psychic powers to children. The descriptions of evil are vague. This is a constant in this film, which unfortunately lacks precision, navigating through approximations and platitudes, without ever managing to get away from them.

An expected scenario - written from scratch

The heroine is Amandla Stenberg, aka «Ruby Daly», a trendy African-American. She has the good fortune to be one of the most dangerous, an «orange». Thanks to her power, she manages to evade the vigilance of both doctors and guards. She survives as best she can in this frightening environment, pretending to be a nice, almost harmless green girl. Finally, she meets a savior in the form of Mandy Moore, Dr. Cate Connor, who offers to help her escape from this open-air, but very real, prison. The young prodigy, far from being a model of fidelity, escapes.

She joins a group of children on the run. Like her, they possess varying degrees of magical powers. Capable of uprooting trees or making electricity flow everywhere, the fine team is on the hunt for the Mecca of evil children: the escapees' village. It's a kind of ecological camping, based on permaculture, tent living and disco parties. A Nuit debout against a backdrop of civil war. A place made desirable by the state of their world. Along the way, they cross paths with bounty hunters, Dr. Cate Connor and her husband, and other hostile creatures. But nothing can stop them, and they finally reach the Oasis. Nothing is quite believable, the world seems at once terribly unfriendly and then terribly light. Nothing works except gas pumps, supermarkets and roads. Not for a second is the success of their mission questioned in the viewer's mind.

The whole thing is a succession of banalities, both in terms of behavior, whether friendly or emotional, and language. Between the «I don't mind the differences, I like you just the way you are» and the «we're a family», it's hard to take this grotesque epic seriously. In the end, you get the impression of witnessing a vulgar compilation of a marketing casting the outrageousness never leaves the poor viewer. Add to this the cartoonish excesses of the love scenes, and you come to the conclusion that, at the very least, it's possible to do better. And above all, that you have better things to do.

Write to the author : nicolas.jutzet@lereregardlibre.com

Photo credit: © Twentieth Century Fox