The Darkest Minds

Based on the series of books by Alexandra Bracken, The Darkest Minds is about a mysterious "disease" named I.A.A.N. (see chart below) that kills all children under the age of 18, except for a select few. The adults are afraid of these surviving children and decide to send them away to entrapment camps. The children fight back and form a resistance group to survive.

This is an example of a movie that is receiving a mix of different reviews, and I bet you don't know who to believe. IMDb has this rated a 5.5/10....ouch. Rotten Tomatoes is at 78% for the audience score. Who do you believe? Me! This movie is much better than a 5/10. I think 78% percent is about right or maybe a bit higher than I would rate it, but it's definitely not a bad movie.

The Darkest Minds is very similar to Divergent, where they separate the kids based on their abilities. In this movie, they are categorized by colors:

The higher up on the chart, the more dangerous the child is. Any child that is rated an orange or red, is set to be terminated immediately. Enter Ruby Daly (Amandla Stenberg). She is an orange that has managed to survive the camps undetected, and with only 2 remaining oranges left in this world, she is unsure of her full abilities.

Let me just take a minute to explain what I.A.A.N. stands for. The chart below explains a lot.

Idiopathic Adolescent Acute Neurodegeneration - sounds like a jumble of random words. Basically it just means that it's a disease that shows up extremely fast in children and that it's because of a decline in the nervous system. The adults don't know why it is happening and they don't know how to cure it, so instead they decide to go all WWII and send the surviving kids away or kill the ones higher up on the chart. Have we not learned from our past mistakes? When do these camps ever work? But, that's how it was in the book, I guess, so that's what happens in this film.

I think some of the acting was a bit adolescent, and some of the jokes just a little too corny, but overall I really enjoyed The Darkest Minds. They covered a lot of stuff and at times I found myself thinking, "Wow this movie is long." It's really not though. It's only 1 hour and 45 minutes. They just cover so much in that time.

I hope that people disregard the reviews and go see this one. It is hurting in terms of box office income. At a little over $8 million in sales and a $34 million production budget, this is not looking good for the rest of the series. I would really like to see where this all ends up, so please go see this movie. If you hate it because you think it's too similar to Divergent, I understand that. In my eyes, this movie is based on a book series, and if that series was able to do well in book sales, then something really good must happen in it to compete with such a popular trilogy such as Divergent. Give it a chance to prove itself. Everyone deserves a second chance.