This Year in PG-13 Dystopia

Kin Squanders Its Promise

Kin is a movie where stealing to survive is a fact of life, where authority figures are gunned down by the anarchic and violent, where one adult bleeds out on the floor and then instructs a kid to “stay down” amidst a mass shooting. It doesn’t bother explaining the central conceit around its Maguffin—an impossibly powerful energy rifle that seems to enjoy an unlimited ammo cheat code—even at the very end, where it’s half-answered in a way that is somehow more confusing and less useful to the premise of the film than if no attempt had been made to answer it at all. A producing effort of Michael B. Jordan, who makes a brief appearance at the end, it is a sadly wasted opportunity.

Set in the blasted-out post-industrial remains of some city that might be Detroit or Gary, Indiana, Kin is telling a story of desperation, of broken families, and of the inescapable bad decisions facing people who have no options in a country that doesn’t care about them. Or it’s trying to. A young boy, Eli (Myles Pruitt, who acquits himself well) and his brother, Jimmy (Jack Reynor, who does not) are the central players in the story around the misplaced weapon. Eli finds it—and some gruesome bodies—inside the abandoned factory where he strips wiring and piping out of the walls for an extra buck. When his adopted brother Jimmy gets back from jail indebted to the gangster Taylor (a greasy James Franco), their father is killed and the two go on the run.

Eventually, Eli pulls the gun in self-defense and Jimmy starts capitalizing on how many obstacles ostensibly vanish in America once you’ve got the biggest gun. There’s a lot of subtext here that isn’t being explored more deeply, subtext that the film neared time and again and that I was personally hoping would be delved into (but, no luck): How a split family affects those within it, how two brothers of different races (Eli is black and Jimmy is white) relate to the same experience of running from the law, how gun violence and gun culture shape our benighted country. They could’ve thrown in the obvious Rick and Morty joke at least.

Instead, we get a fairly short and straightforward road trip movie, ending in a brazen shootout in a police station that ends up mostly bloodless when it should be gruesome. It’s ended when Eli, who’s never lifted a weapon before in his life and is facing off against multiple armed adults, just de-atomizes them with his sweet-ass new toy. It feels, overwhelmingly, like this was made into a YA-adjacent story when it was originally intended for a hard R rating, with the central player not the two brothers but the gore that the space-gun creates when you lovingly pull its trigger.

The movie is rated for and aimed at 13-year-olds, but it has very little to say to them. It seems to be saying to the adults at home ,“Hey, look, this is relevant. You should bring your angsty teen.”

The Darkest Minds, the To-and-Fro Tone

Award-winning sci-fi author Ann Leckie was recently asked at a book fair in St. Louis why there’s so much dystopia aimed at the middle school set these days. Her response—that if you’re in middle school, you’re already in a kind of a dystopia—drew some knowing chuckles. She’s not wrong, but the dystopia she’s referring to doesn’t look anything like The Darkest Minds.

Aimed at a younger demographic (and adapting the first novel in a series by Alexandra Bracken), The Darkest Minds is set in a near future where some unexplainable affliction has killed most children and left the survivors with volatile superpowers, all easily sortable into color-coded categories. The kids’ eyes even glow the right color, which leads you to really question how on Earth 16-year-old Ruby (Amandla Stenberg) got away with hiding her identity as one of the “Orange” level children. When the government rounds up all surviving children and herds them into camps to perform pointless manual labor, killing or brainwashing any of the ones who are too special, it all kind of feels a bit on the nose.

Ruby is broken out of her concentration camp by Cate (Mandy Moore), whom she quickly learns is working for some other organization that the hunky fellow runaway Liam believes to be trying to exploit superpowered children in their fight against the government. If you’ve followed along with The Hunger Games and its various ilk, you know that you’re basically in for one crappy betrayal after another, the sort of story where only our heroes have any moral fortitude and everybody else is a selfish, cynical manipulator willing to feed their underlings to enemy artillery at the slightest provocation. Do kids think this is how wars and resistances really are?

Numerous things about this experience grate. There’s the complete waste of Gwendoline Christie as a villain with zero traits or backstory, the out-of-nowhere fire-breathing kids in the last sixteenth of the last reel, the maddening insistence on throwing a breathy pop song on at exactly the wrong damn time every single time, the fact the damn color-coded system of ascending kiddo threat level deviates from the order you find those colors in the visible spectrum, the fact we get no explanation of whether or not parents are still having kids and if those kids are still having a 90 percent mortality rate with the survivors getting CT-scanned and color-coded and ripped from the arms of their mothers to be put into camps (not that that would be in any relevant to our current moment in history or anything). This on top of the fact the tone cannot sit still throughout. (Given that the movie just barely made its modest $34 million budget back with a few million in change—foreign market included—that’s likely all she wrote for this particular fledgling film franchise.)

Meanwhile, Let’s Check In on the Worries of Actual Kids
Questions about how adults mistreat kids, how institutions shove them into categories, how broken families and desperate circumstances and gun culture are ready to prey on them, are all things that we, the grownups, are fretting about right now because we elected to the highest office in the country a man who worships crass brutality, and let him fill all his positions with horrible people. Kids did not do that, and while they are worrying about that stuff on some level, I think the day-to-day fears they have are far different.

There’s a great movie about those things: Bo Burnham’s debut feature-length film Eighth Grade, which you’ve read about here at Paste and which you know is awesome and which, you’ll remember, I pointed out is rated R and thus out of reach of most of the kids whose insecurities it gives a refreshing new voice.

I was sitting in a screening of it, marveling at all the things big and little that it did right, when one unrelentingly real scene started, in which an older teen begins pressuring the movie’s young adult lead into sex. It was a scene everybody in the audience knew was coming because of the slow build-up and the way Burnham chose to point his camera, what and who he chose to make that scene about—and from somewhere else in the theater, a parent started marching her kids out of the screening.

I question whether or not she would have during a different scene in The Darkest Minds when, 74 minutes into the feature, Ruby barely stops a psionic date rape by a trusted male character. It doesn’t land with nearly the intended impact. It’s meant to show the audience that this one character is a villain. The Eighth Grade scene was about the protagonist—about the young woman and her emotions and the very real thing causing her very real fear.

It didn’t feel like it was aimed at me at all, and I’m glad of that.

Kenneth Lowe is midway upon the journey of his life. You can follow him on Twitter and read more at his blog.