The Darkest Minds

The Darkest Minds is smart. It has a lot to convey to its young audience, and the strong cast does everything in their power to illustrate those themes and to bring their characters to earnest, believable life. But it’s not quite thrilling enough to sneak its mission statements under anyone’s noses, so it plays a bit more like a manifesto than a sci-fi thriller.

Long on set up and leaden dialogue, short on resolution, The Darkest Minds is set in an apocalyptic future where teen movies no longer have endings. Oh, wait that’s the present.

I suppose it’s possible to argue that The Darkest Minds can be enjoyed for what it is. Unfortunately, that “what” refers to something incomplete.

The film shares far too many tropes with other YA sci-fi properties – The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Divergent – to make a mark in the unforgiving post-apocalyptic wasteland of the adolescent market. That said, the casting is strong.

The Darkest Minds never communicates the overwhelming horror of a society whose children are either dead or in the process of being exterminated, or the hopelessness of kids discovering that every potential benefactor may have ulterior motives.

The Darkest Minds isn’t atrocious so much as it’s just plain dull, which is a worse kind of bad to be.

The movie is 105 minutes long but seems about 45 minutes longer, with uneventful stretches and at least three sections where the action stops for musical interludes featuring goopy pop music.

This movie is by far my favorite movie. The ending made me cry and it was left on a cliffhanger. I really hope that they make the second book, "Never Fade" into a movie.

This is a movie in the same vein as "The Hunger Games" which is better than this and "Maze Runner" which is worse. It has an interesting premise. The actors are better than average and entirely new to me. I recommend it for those with a few hours to kill instead of watching either of the other two I've mentioned above for the millionth time.

This film had the ability to be soooo good but, for some reason, with the shoddy acting and terrible music with a quite boring cast and awful story line, this film didn’t turn out to be good at all. Also, what’s the deal with all these voice overs??? What I will say, however, is that this movie is one that you may wanna watch as a last resort - like when you’re ill or just really bored. There r sooooo many better films out there though so I’d just say choose one of those. I just feel sorry for some of the well known actors in this movie and I think they were really let down by the outcome

Have you seen the Fox series ''Gifted'' that ties to the X-Men franchise? It demands more time but it's kind of the same deal and it's way better.

Its like they tried to pack a TV series into a film. The main character's parents forget who she is and 2 seconds later she's being picked up by dudes in biohazard suits? The country is post-apocalyptic because there aren't any children? The open ending indicating a sequel...yeah right. Don't bother watching this. It should have been dumped on Netflix.