With her live-action directorial debut, Jennifer Yuh Nelson rapidly squanders the goodwill generated by her Oscar-nominated direction of the second and third Kung Fu Panda films. The Darkest Minds is the at-least-five-years-too-late final gasp of Hollywood's mostly ill-fated young-adult gold rush, and it might be the form's nadir. Or at least in unhealthy competition for the title with The 5th Wave, The Host, and the third Divergent film. Nothing is right here, honestly. The dystopia depicted is poorly developed and a tad confusing (90 percent of the world's children are dead...the remaining 10 percent have developed color-coded, X-Men-style superpowers and are quarantined...and most of America has become overgrown and abandoned in six years' time). The pacing alternates between lugubrious and rushed, and the film is punctuated by deeply odd musical interludes because nothing says on the run in a frightening new world more succinctly than...adorable, Instagram-ready montages set to synth pop. The screenplay commits the classic-for-this-sub-genre sin of devoting more time to teasing future installments (which will never be realized after the opening Friday's paltry gross) than telling anything resembling a well-structured, self-contained story. The teenage characters are bland and interchangeable, and the recognizable adult names in the credits, including Mandy Moore, Bradley Whitford, and Game of Thrones' Gwendoline Christie, have glorified cameos at best. Christie is particularly badly wasted; her character is the most enigmatic, but she is barely introduced before the film is through with her. I guess she will have more to do in The Darkest Minds 2, coming in two-thousand and never.