THE NEW MUTANTS: An Era Fizzles Out

Well, that’s it, the last of the Fox X-Men movies. Twenty years, 11 movies (plus two Deadpools), and a completely changed cinema landscape later, this is a franchise that undoubtedly left its mark.

It all began in 2000, before superhero movies were box office smashes, with a carefully budgeted $75 million effort that looks minuscule by today’s standards. I can’t emphasize this enough: people weren’t sure how to make superhero movies back then. The blueprint wasn’t set and audiences hadn’t been taught their language, not in the way we so easily and collectively digest them now. But X-Men had ambition, and had a vision, one that was perfected just three years later in X2 and would be teased apart over the next two decades. The series was never the streamlined machine of the MCU. It was never the approachable little guy of the Spider-Man iterations. And it sure as hell wasn’t the dour quagmire of the DCEU. It never wanted to be any of those things, and you can see that in the jagged, thoughtful spread of X-Men, to which the rest of the films always circled back to. 

Full disclosure: I adore this franchise. It was natural for a gay preteen/teen to be drawn to the original trilogy’s very blatant gay rights metaphor, but as I grew and the franchise expanded into much larger themes about civil rights movements, its solidifying ethos only became more touching. These movies were never about fighting to save the world. They were about fighting to make it better.

Any future X-Men movies will be made under the careful supervision of Kevin Feige and will likely fit into the heavily manicured MCU, one that is unlikely to allow such a delicate concept to be the backbone of its characters. I could be wrong. I hope I’m wrong. But I doubt I am.

As if prepping for that future, The New Mutants is a glimpse of what these movies might look like. A less polished version, to be sure, but one that is blander, more adrift, more afraid to say anything beyond platitudes.

Lost In The Woods

The gory details of how this movie got made and released have been reported ad nauseam, so suffice it to say that it was shot in 2017, then its release was delayed for a few months, disagreements arose behind the scenes about how much horror it should contain, extensive reshoots were planned but not done, more delays were announced, Fox was acquired by Disney, Disney seemed to want nothing to do with it, and finally it was dumped during a pandemic. And that’s the short version!

New Mutants bares the scares of an uncertain vision, but after all that mess, it’s hard to tell who is to blame for its mishmash. What we got was a bit of teen drama and a bit of horror, both with moments that actually work but with neither fully paying off. This paucity is extra bizarre when you realize that, in the world of the X-Men, this is a very small scale movie. There are really only 6 characters: Danielle (Blu Hunt), a teen orphaned after a mysterious disaster, Dr. Reyes (Alice Braga), a doctor supposedly looking after her, and the four other teens already under Reyes’ care. All are sequestered at a suspiciously secure facility, the location of which the teens and the audience are left unsure of, and as would naturally happen with five teens and one adult stuck together, they drive each other crazy.

The teens are the titular new mutants (and, of course, they’re not yet in control of their powers), so when I say they drive each other crazy, they really do some damage. Such a small setup should’ve allowed New Mutants to really dig into these characters, which is a pretty obvious goal, but they never really do it. The bits we get of each character’s background makes clear connections between their powers manifesting and some truly horrific events, ones that would’ve justified a full-blown descent into psychological trauma-as-horror. That would’ve made for a new wrinkle in the old ‘learning to be proud of your differences’ thread of the X-Men franchise and at least connected this a bit to the world the other movies established.

Problem is The New Mutants doesn’t really coalesce around this point (or any point, for that matter), instead of getting sidetracked by a few too many rebellious bonding experiences that ostensibly could’ve gotten them to the same message but mostly go nowhere. The horror elements are what pretty consistently move New Mutants forward, making it a shame they got watered down somewhere along the way.

Trust Your Audience

What does seem to lay at co-writer/director Josh Boone‘s feet is the movie’s failure to trust its audience to figure anything out, and I mean anything. It’s an unfortunate downside, one that makes it feel much more akin to the platitude-filled messaging of most modern superhero films and less like the more nuanced and challenging X-Men franchise. Sure, X-Men has always been full of philosophizing, but as characters developed over the series ideologies were linked more and more to experience and the series became a web of well-intentioned, scared people trying to find solutions instead of good guys facing off against bad guys. To infuse such a messy worldview to its big set pieces has always been a trademark of the X-Men franchise, and to have it missing from New Mutants is a jarring departure.

That’s not to say everyone here is either cuddly or monstrous, it’s just that the battle lines get drawn very clearly. Danielle is such an innocent newbie that she’s obviously got a good heart, and when Rahne (Maisie Williams) quickly takes Danielle under her wing and more, if you catch my drift (I mean they’re in adorable puppy love), she’s also immediately and permanently put on the good side. Anya Taylor-Joy‘s Illyana is a straight-up bully, but the damage that makes this forgivable quickly surfaces. Then there are the two boys, Charlie Heaton‘s Sam and Henry Zaga‘s Roberto, who exist in a troubled but innocuous middle ground. The teen drama elements, along with the ominous facility that only Dr. Reyes can control, make the lone adult the clear villain, and she’s not really given any complicating traits.

None of them, in fact, are given complicating traits. Instead, this talented group of actors is forced to play broad stereotypes and given impossibly exaggerated accents to navigate. That they stumble over the latter is forgivable, because seriously, the accents are ludicrous, and it’s far more important that they bring some humanity to their barely sketched characters. Some of them manage to overcome these lazily developed characters, like Heaton, who is in a comfortably similar mode to his Stranger Things character. Some even overcome uncomfortable stereotyping, like Williams‘ queer coding 101 haircut, allowing you to forget that the romance is only partially developed because she and Hunt are so darn sweet together.

What can’t be overcome is the whitewashing of Roberto, the privileged rich boy that in the comics is apparently Afro-Brazilian. Zaga is a light-skinned Brazilian, which is troubling enough, but Boone’s comment about Zaga being someone who looks “like a guy who’s had the silver spoon in his mouth” makes the casting pretty clearly based on the racist assumption that light-skinned people are more wealthy than dark-skinned people. That is, simply put, awful and part of a huge problem in the industry.

Visual shorthands are, of course, always a part of filmmaking, but that they are so rampant in New Mutants makes it clear Boone wasn’t willing to let audiences figure anything out for themselves. Add in that we also get things like very unnecessary voice-overs and characters in this horror-infused teen movie watching the Buffy episode “Hush” and the hand-holding just becomes frustrating. So no matter how many individual scenes work, from some really chilling demons to some charming bonding sessions, New Mutants just doesn’t engage your brain as the better X-Men movies have.

Conclusion: The New Mutants

Far from the dumpster fire many feared, The New Mutants is a much more mundane disappointment: a near miss. This concept, in the hands of people who let its ideas simmer into something tasty, could’ve ended Fox’s X-Men franchise on a unique high note. Instead, it sputters out, an ignominious end to a laudable big-budget trailblazer.

Have you seen The New Mutants? Do you think it was a fitting end to Fox’s X-Men franchise? Let us know in the comments!

The New Mutants released in theaters in the US on August 28th, 2020. It will be released in the UK on September 4th, 2020.

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