A stoic, big-picture character who will do anything to get what he wants, but can hide his dark side in public opinion to gain sympathy, Gray is a rare entrepreneurial talent.
There are many science fiction works with young people and children as the main subject matter, and a significant number of them are personal adventures with a skewed audience, such as Breaking Babe. Another group uses children’s themes as a backbone to write about society, the workplace and the darker side of human nature. This is the case with Liu Cixin’s Supernova Chronicles, and this is also the case with Dark Minds, which will be discussed in this article.
The 2018 American sci-fi film Dark Minds is a sci-fi ‘start-up’ film set in the dramatic opposite of the Supernova Chronicles. Whereas the latter had a cosmic storm that killed off every adult on the planet, the former had a plague that killed off almost every child in America, but those who survived could have all types of superpowers.
The film follows the development of a young black girl patient who is infected with a strange disease called IAAN but doesn’t die and is taken by the army into a concentration camp for isolation and rehabilitation. In the camp, the doctors grade the surviving children according to their superpowers, the lowest being green, the most dangerous orange and in between blue, yellow and red, a bit like the card colour scale of the different levels of plants in the game Plants vs Zombies 2. Moreover, the different colours also represent different types of superpowers: green is an intelligence boost, the most harmless kind; blue has some ability to control objects and is as dangerous as Magneto or Black Phoenix; yellow seems to be able to control energy such as electricity, similar to Thunder Shazam or Flash; red is tyrannically aggressive like Laser Eye; and orange is the highest level and can control other people’s minds. The seemingly harmless little girl, Ruby Daley, happens to be the most dangerous orange, and by law should be executed. She uses this mind-controlling power to get a doctor to change her to green, which allows her to survive the camp and sets the stage for her escape later.
The film’s superpower set-up is quite ambitious, almost replicating a good chunk of the superheroes from the X-Men and DC universes. However, like Russia’s Guardians: A Century of War, which couldn’t compete with the Marvel franchise in a single film, Dark Minds is largely saucy with the exception of the orange type of superpower that serves to drive the main plot, providing only a modest stage for stunts to be displayed.
Why is this a sci-fi “start-up” film? There are three main forces in the film: the most powerful is the adult entrepreneurial team, representing the forces of oppression, represented by the concentration camps, the military and the president, who are acting crazy. As the saying goes, the mentally ill think big, and this group of people are quite entrepreneurial in their approach: if you look at the children as patients, they are extremely expensive to treat and care for, and risk being incurable; if that’s the case, why not look at them as weapons instead? The children of the red class are sufficiently destructive and still manageable that they are the perfect candidates for an army of mass destruction.
Of course, there were also sympathetic children in the adult ranks who did not agree with the oppressive use of children, and they formed the Children’s Alliance to protect super-powered children. This group plays an important role in saving the heroine Daly in the early stages, but suddenly disappears, only to reappear at the end of the film, and thus has less of a presence, surviving only the brutal business competition.
The third group of forces are the escaped children, led by the President’s son Gray, also an orange superpower, who live and work in a paradise, the most vulnerable party, whose survival depends on not being discovered by the forces of evil.
It’s difficult to get a perfectly balanced portrayal of the three forces in a film, let alone the five colours of green, blue, yellow, red and orange: it took three Divergent series films to get five factions and the third Hobbit series film to get the “Battle of the Five Armies” together, not to mention the Three Kingdoms, which could be filmed over 80 episodes in one go. The Hobbit series didn’t get its “Five Armies” together until the third film, let alone the Three Kingdoms, which had more than 80 episodes. Dark Minds unfortunately fails to break through in this respect as well. With the forces of the Children’s League marginalised, the only main conflict in the film is between the oppressionists and the children’s flight and confrontation. Although the presence of a villain makes the plot less monotonous, it does not escape the tendency to morph into a simple “evil is better than good” thriller.
In order to emphasise the theme of entrepreneurship, the film’s other love line is also thin, as Daley falls in love with Liam, a handsome man with remote control powers, but for some inexplicable reason they can’t be together. It seems the intention is to use the contradiction between Daley’s passion for his career and his children’s love for the Children’s League to reflect the rule that loyalty and filial piety are difficult to balance, and that family and career are impossible to balance, in order to warn young strivers not to stay in their comfort zone, but to be committed and active, so that their bosses can have more “money”.
The central character of the “entrepreneur” in the film is actually the president’s son, Gray, who stands with the children, ostensibly as the leader of the Resistance, but in fact in collusion with the military, intending to pool together the super-powered children of the Resistance and send them to the military as a one-time labour force, providing them with cheap or even unpaid labour. This kind of “business acumen” is incomparable to that of the Children’s League, a group of forces with no presence at all.
Gray was subjected to the same kind of brutal persecution as the concentration camps when he first fell ill, but rather than let it drive him away from money and power, he used his persecution to turn himself into an undercover entrepreneur, using his business model of “channeling” to big platforms to reap huge rewards. Judging by the size of the legions of red children sent by the military to fight, Gray’s business model has been working properly for quite some time, and the innocent children would still be in Gray’s hands if he hadn’t somehow gone berserk in his attempt to bring Daley in and exchange psychic powers with him, causing Daley, a dangerous man who is also orange and has the aura of a protagonist, to take advantage of the situation and expose his plot. The supply continues to turn over in a steady stream.
Entrepreneur Gray is a rare entrepreneurial talent who is stoic, has a big-picture view, will do anything to get what he wants, but is able to hide his dark side in public opinion to gain sympathy. His downfall is that he likes to go it alone and fails to train his own partners or assistants, so that when he faces difficulties he has to call on the forces of the head office for assistance, which is tantamount to declaring his own incompetence in disguise. Eventually his entrepreneurial base was destroyed and he had no choice but to return to the head office to inherit and lead the bulk of the oppressive forces, which would obviously take away the fun of being an entrepreneur.
