"THE DARKEST MINDS".........SMELLS LIKE TEEN DYSTOPIA.......

The Darkest Minds (2018)   Without BD (Beloved Daughter) insisting we sit down and watch this Blu-Ray with her, we wouldn't have gone within a 1000 miles of this movie.........

              At least BD only coughed up a couple bucks for this, having grabbed it during the Thanksgiving night madness at Wal-Mart.......when all sorts of crummy movies achieve their actual value......

                Why 20th Century Fox put it into production is a mystery beyond us........since every major studio had already flushed millions down the drain as they tried to launch teenage dystopian franchises........(still chasing after the big bucks and mass audiences generated by "Twilight" and "The Hunger Games")

                  Teen Dystopia books and films hinge on one primal, inevitable premise.........after some cataclysmic event turns the world upside down, the adults will turn into psychopathic, fascistic creeps whose one and only goal is to oppress and murder teenagers...........(so the kids don't just get grounded by mom and dad......they get put into the ground....)

                  "The Darkest Minds" blends this exhausted trope with an equally lame imitation of       "X-Men".......with a mysterious new childhood disease leaving its survivors afflicted (or gifted, from a teen's point of view) with a variety of superpowers......mind-reading, telekenesis, conducting electricity, yada yada, yada........

                    So of course the grown-ups herd the kids into concentration camps, where they're regularly abused by beefy guards who look left over from direct-to-video Steven Seagal movies.......

                    Again, we've no idea why the studio thought anyone was left with the slightest interest in watching another one of these tiresome, connect-the-dots, chase-and-kill-the-teens movies.

                     Incredibly, in a show of huge hubris, the movie ends with all its plot points  dangling.......as if they expected to make two or three more films........as if they expected anyone would care........as if they expected anyone even planned to show up for the first movie.......

                       Little did they know, we guess. Now they do.  Zero stars (0)........whoever gave the greenlight to make "The Darkest Minds".....made the dumbest choice......