A spoiler-heavy movie review.
Hot on the heels of their characteristically-safe “Mulan 2020”, Disney has seen fit to release Josh Boone’s “The New Mutants”: a decidedly-unsafe choice for pandemic viewing. Sure, audiences may have been clamoring for something “different” in 2018 (its originally-intended release date) in a market that was saturated by “Star Wars” and Marvel & DC movie adaptations. But it’s two-years-on and people are finally starting to question their own culture, and a superhero movie where the “heroes” are disturbed teenagers unable to control their fledgling powers due to their combined childhood traumas is not necessarily upbeat family entertainment; especially if all anyone is looking for right now is non-binary escapism. Yes, The New Mutants is “different”, when compared to Twentieth Century Fox’s pre-Disney slew of X-Men movies. So “different” in fact that it probably scared producers, who feared making a return on an investment that toes-the-line between a “Netflix”-style teenie-bopper serial and an Ari Aster thriller. So it was shelved, pending reshoots to “lighten” its tone. Flash-forward two years and even star Maisie Williams’ “Game of Thrones” series had ended in the time-gap: everyone got older and moved-on. On top of that, Disney bought out Fox, and what we have now is the much-touted “original version”, presumably released as a stop-gap in an otherwise-vacant theatrical schedule. Because, content-aside, who really cares anymore?
Fox’s X-Men architect Bryan Singer was #metoo’d, ending his career. Their last two movies “Apocalypse” and “Dark Phoenix” (the latter with another Game of Thrones-alumn, Sophie Turner) bombed. Really, they didn’t know what to do with the franchise. So no wonder that, back in 2018, The New Mutants was seen as a renaissance of-sorts for the series, promising a “dark new direction” with a hot young cast of up-and-comers and a passionate director fresh off a hit (the “Fault In Our Stars” adaptation). It’s just too bad they waited so long: releasing it now – in the middle of the pandemic with little-to-no direct genre competition – feels just as non-confident on Disney’s part as it did with Fox. As it stands today, The New Mutants is a watchable, well-made & well-paced horror movie that happens to have mutants in it. But I can see its subject matter making viewers with different expectations very uncomfortable.
The New Mutants is what happens when you take the X-Men and run it through the various filters of a teen movie; a mental-asylum movie; and a movie with a bunch of people in a room. Seriously, the main cast is less than the sum of the fingers on both my hands, and they really couldn’t have picked a better ensemble. Alice Braga (the badass Brazilian from “Repo Men” and “Predators”) plays a “doctor” treating a small group of adolescent & out-of-control mutants in an abandoned institution, professing that she’s courting them for Dr. Xavier’s school when really she’s been hired by a shadowy organization to turn these delinquents into weapons of the state. Williams is an emo-lesbian who can turn into a wolf; Anna Taylor-Joy (“Split”) is a blond-haired Russian who can – from what I could gather – travel inter-dimensionally; Charlie Heaton (TV’s “Stranger Things”) is a human-rocket; Henry Zaga (TV’s “Teen Wolf”) is a human-torch; and Blu Hunt, as their latest recruit, is an aboriginal with an undiscovered power that ultimately drives the story. Each of the kids gets their own flashback to when they “awakened” – and the damage they endured, and caused, as a result – and its Hunt’s ability to physically-manifest their fears that forces each of them to confront the reality of their powers, and finally escape their confinement. Everyone, from Braga to the kids, do a great job with their roles, if only because they are not written as your cookie-cutter characters. There is some heavy shit they have to work through, and they are all up to the challenge; in particular Taylor-Joy, who is starting to make a career now out of the resurrection of otherwise-lost and fractured female roles. Her Illyana was, presumably, a sex-slave from a single-digit age until she used her powers to kill her captors, and it is her fear of the men who raped her that provide the imagery for the film’s biggest third-act threat.
Yes, if you ever thought an X-Men movie’s central villains could ever be a cortège of child rapists who look like a cross between the neomorph from “Alien: Covenant” and leftovers from “Silent Hill” – with added Russian mob-style chest tattoos – then, well, I suppose your friends owe you that money they bet against you, if they’re even still your friends. Really, after the recent hypocrisy of “Tenet” (where all its sole-leading female had to do was get the shit kicked out of her by controlling men), I never would have thought that The New Mutants would be so unsettling as general entertainment, but it was. We hear in-detail about how Heaton killed his father and tens-of-others in a mineshaft collapse; how Williams was beaten and branded(!) by a priest who discovered her power (only to have her relive everything once Hunt comes to stay at the facility); and self-harm and suicidal thoughts run unchecked. It’s mind-blowing that this movie exists in this form at all, and only being PG-13 (begging the question what a tamer, re-edited version would be like). Sad, then, that it’s so well-made. For a movie that takes place 70% of the time at night, it was competently-lit and comprehensibly-staged. The first time we see powers being used (with Taylor-Joy and Hunt having a bitch-off) was brief but awesome, especially to be reminded that I was, in fact, watching an X-Men spin-off. Speaking of effects, having a limited cast has obviously impacted the film’s design budget in a big way, with an action-packed climax that looks great even when it’s oddly comic-booky: a strange stricture for a comic-book conversion (Hunt and the group facing her fear of a giant red-eyed Spirit Bear that nearly decimates the entire installation). It’s short (a breezy 90-minutes). But I’ll never watch it again, and I can’t really recommend it either. I was reminded of M. Night Shyamalan’s “Glass”, which – despite being the third in a trilogy – follows the same beats as this. Yes, it was released in 2019 – after New Mutants had already wrapped the first time – but the idea of people with powers being subjugated by those trying to convince them that they’re crazy was comparable. The difference being, where Glass frequently broke the fourth-wall and played with audience expectations of the superhero genre (by drawing direct attention to the various tropes), The New Mutants is deadly-serious from beginning-to-end with nary-a-wink. It is the film that Twentieth Century Fox needed two-years-ago to resuscitate its dying X-Men cinematic franchise, but it’s not the film the public needs in 2020. It ends as most superhero movies do with the promise of future installments, but if box office numbers are anything to go by then this may be the last we see of this quintuplet until Disney decides we all need a hundred-hour streaming series out of it.
//jf 9.19.2020
Poster sourced from joblo.com.
theory of a daskeman 