NEW FILM: THE DARKEST MINDS…

Looking for a new teen thriller?

Criteria…

A disease that wipes out 98% of the world’s children?

Government roundups that send the survivors to concentration-camp-like rehabilitation facilities?

Heavily armed “tracers” tasked with hunting down the few who manage to escape?

Despite its PG-13 rating, “The Darkest Minds” would have been one of the darkest teen fantasy thrillers ever made — if not for all the other dark teen fantasy thrillers out there these days, and erringly resembling (the currant President attitude!).

Based on the first book in Alexandra Bracken’s young adult trilogy and directed by “Kung Fu Panda 2” helmer Jennifer Yuh Nelson, this relatively intense adolescent-focused action movie borrows nearly all its ingredients from other popular sci-fi franchises — from “X-Men” to “Stranger Things” — and doesn’t much seem to mind if kids recognize how derivative it is (at one point, the two romantic leads talk about how they feel like characters in a Harry Potter movie).

Casting an actress from another series — Amandla Stenberg of “The Hunger Games” — as Ruby Daly, a 16-year-old with abilities she doesn’t yet know how to control.

An exposition-heavy prologue establishes an outbreak of a highly contagious disease called IAAN, or Idiopathic Adolescent Acute Neurodegeneration, that targets only children.

Ruby is eating lunch in the school cafeteria when a classmate starts shaking uncontrollably, then falls to the floor dead. According to news reports, the same thing swiftly happened to nearly all the minors on Earth — a super dark premise that would be truly nightmare-inducing if depicted — leaving only a small number of survivors, among them the president’s son, Clancy Gray (Patrick Gibson).

Are no more children born from this point forward?

How do parents feel about losing their kids?

Would they really permit authorities to separate and execute the survivors? (Bracken’s story clearly takes place in an alternate reality from the one in which citizens protest Trump’s immigrant child detention facilities.) And why do the survivors suddenly develop special abilities, ranging from telekinesis to mind control?

God only knows at this point!

The message of “The Darkest Minds” remains as valuable as ever – calls to be yourself, embrace your talents, take care of your friends, and battle injustice never go out of fashion – and, given the film’s first act setting of a government-run camp populated by children, there is a timely side to all of this, but it still feels as if it’s arrived five years too late.

It is, however, fitting a film about the strength of kids.

Lookout for a standout performance from its young stars, including Amandla Stenberg (herself a “Hunger Games” alum) and “Beach Rats” breakout Harris Dickinson, along with Miya Cech and Skylan Brooks.

Worth the wait?

Culturedemandsgeeks thinks so…