By Christopher Hooker (Twitter: @GoKartMedia)
*NOTE: The entire team here at Video CULTure strongly believes that it is not safe to go to traditional movie theaters at the time of this review’s publication. We advise seeing any new films at socially distanced “drive-in” theater locations or using video on-demand services in the safety of your own home.
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It’s hard to review this film. There will be spoilers in this review, but I’ll try to save some good stuff for you, too. I’m not going to review this as someone who doesn’t like the original comic books or pretends not to have collected comics. I went to see the film exactly because I loved the original Chris Claremont story.
(There will also be politics in this review… yes, scary politics… because this is an X-Men movie and the goddamned world is on fire, Sir, so deal with my politics.)
Let me get a few of the spoilers out of the way:
• No, the MCU opening does not grace this film.
• No, there’s no after-credits scene.
• No, there’s no appearance of other X-Men, not even DEADPOOL’s Colossus. No, there’s no Kitty Pryde, either.
• No, there’s no moment where they turn up in Westchester.
…in short, there is no evidence from any part of this film that there will be a sequel or that any element of it will be folded into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Instead, this is the swan song of 20th Century Fox’s X-Universe, one last hurrah.
Who remembers SUICIDE SQUAD? Not the James Gunn 2021 film, but the 2016 David Ayer film? One of the things I have the most trouble with is the bar scene. The pace stops because the writers either couldn’t figure out a justifiable reason for the Squad to save the day, or the reason was cut out of the film with heavy edits. The end result: the big hero moment of SUICIDE SQUAD feels unearned.
That’s some of what happens in THE NEW MUTANTS. There are moments where things seem to jump ahead illogically, that suggests pages torn from a script instead of diligent rewriting. And I feel that we missed out on a lot we needed to see.
But what we’re left with, is the beginnings of a good movie for teens about why they already ARE the next generation of Mutants. If it hadn’t been for the Disney buy-out of Fox, this film might have kept the Fox studios X-Universe going just a little bit longer.
Had they just used some good common sense. And one of the biggest fails of this movie… is in the casting.
I was one of the first people to own the graphic novel when it came out. It was a smart concept: a new generation of X-Men learning to deal with their powers, unaware that their host (Professor Charles Xavier) was plotting against them (he was infected with a Brood Queen).
As a kid myself, I got to see a kid not unlike me in the character of Sam, and experience kids I never really came into contact with in ‘Berto and Dani. (I actually had a best friend who was Vietnamese-American at the time, so Xi’an was less exotic to me than Dani and ‘Berto) And made me fall madly in love with a Scottish redhead named Rahne (pronounced “rain”).
I collected the issues up until Cypher died and then I lost interest. That Fall of the Mutants storyline still makes me angry. The Marvel Comics Universe is very big and does need clearing out now and then, but honestly, killing Cypher was a move I still have a lot of anger about. I loved him and Warlock and it hurt me deeply when he died.
Looking back on what our society has become now, and how easy it is to shrug off a human being who did no wrong being shot seven times in the back by a policeman, or excuse or praise an underage kid for illegally murdering people protesting the first attempted murder… I realize that it’s not that out of place to have heroic protagonists die senseless and gratuitous deaths.
When I heard what the filmmakers had done to the New Mutants story—made it about teenagers, used the Demon Bear storyline, subverted the genre to horror, and set it in a mutant containment facility—I thought it was likely going to be a really brilliant take on the typical superhero story. A breath of fresh air to it. Not BLADE, not really, but more like SCREAM with spandex.
The plot is simple: we see Dani the night her world is destroyed. We don’t get any footage of her in her life before this, though, so we have no context to make us care for the loss she suffers, other than seeing her dad (brilliant cameo by Adam Beach) die to protect her. She wakes up in a ward for mutants, run by Dr. Reyes (Alice Braga), and as we delve into the mystery of her mutant power, we discover Reyes may be holding all the residents there against their will.
The announced casting really thrilled me. Maisie Williams (Arya Stark, “Game of Thrones”) as Rahne was a bit off (not the thin little ginger waif she was in the comics), but I knew the actress was still going to deliver on a decent Scottish accent and do a great job of making me care about the film version of Rahne. And, she does. She is the best part of this film, hands down… both in how she’s written, and how she’s acted.
Anya Taylor-Joy as Illyana was also good news. I loved her in THE WITCH and the Shyamalan films, and she physically reminded me of Magik (a child-like innocent face and a tendency towards dark expressions). So, she was good news, too. And while the character is acted well, she’s where everything begins to go wrong. Because they write her as a nasty brat, a “Mean Girl” to make you like Dani better. She says some racist stuff to Dani; and that’s not very forgivable later. Instead of introducing Belasco and demons, they make Illyana’s demons… metaphoric. (More on that later.)
Although I had no prior experience with their choice of ‘Berto (Sunspot) and Dani (Mirage), I did know Charlie Heaton (Sam, aka Cannonball) from STRANGER THINGS), and was confident he could do okay by Sam, and I’m not certain he did. Part of the problem is that he’s not a teenager. He’s not coming into this situation like a teen. I don’t believe his Sam when talks about the mines. They needed a kid from Kentucky, Pennsylvania or Virginia to make this believable.
The casting in many ways was an issue. ‘Berto’s actor (Henry Zaga) was not bad but was also not the same Sunspot as in the character in the comics. He was perhaps a better representation of a South American kid than he had been. But the character has also been unfortunately lightened for the big screen; ‘Berto was both black and latinx, and that was an element that THE NEW MUTANTS failed to deliver on. His skin color did become an issue and was cleverly mixed in with prejudice towards mutants to show that BOTH are wrong, in the comics. It’s a misfire not to include that in the adaptation.
Also, ‘Berto was a ‘player’, generally pretty smooth with the ladies in social situations. In the film, they have him bluffing, being utterly useless up close. ‘Berto turns out to be a terrified virgin, and it’s a brilliant send-up both of latinx-lover stereotypes and of black males being too sexually active. I want to believe that Claremont made you trust that you were looking at the stereotype and then peeled back the layers to show you that he was just a kid, and as scared about becoming an adult as the rest of us were, but that’s just not true. Claremont was using a stereotype like a template and someone here used it for good. Point to the movie for taking this aspect of his personality and doing something useful with it.
Dani’s actress (Blu Hunt) isn’t bad, but she doesn’t make the same kind of impression the comic character does, and that’s on the writing. Claremont’s Dani comes into the X-Mansion as a kid with a chip on her shoulder. Here, she’s a traumatized teen who can’t stand up for herself. I missed the fierceness of Dani. When she resolves herself, she does it calmly and peacefully instead of with that fire. That fire should have scared Illyana a little, frankly, and taken over the team leader mantle.
So, there’s a glaring error here. A major character is gone. She helped racially balance Claremont’s vision and she was replaced by Magik, meaning we took out the only Asian character, dropped that blackness from ‘Berto, and what we have are some very white kids and two POC. And it suffers for the lack of representation… but it also suffers for the lack of Xi’an as a character.
Xi’an being forced to be one of the captors to ensure the safety of her younger siblings would have been very easy to write in. Someone in the process of adapting the story jettisoned Xi’an to make the story more compact and focused, and to give Magik more time… and that’s exactly what they shouldn’t have done.
The real strengths of THE NEW MUTANTS are the changes they made unapologetically. Dani and Rahne, close in the comics, become lovers in this film. They are a really good fit. At first, when they showed Willow and Tara’s first kiss on Buffy, I sighed sadly. I was convinced that the lesbian chemistry between Rahne and Dani would be left ambiguous enough to ignore in foreign markets. But it wasn’t. And then they weren’t crudely exploitive of the relationship, either. It anchors a lot of how these alienated mutants form a team in the final chapter. Which makes it doubly sad that Xi’an—the first lesbian superhero—didn’t get to be in this story.
There’s a moment where Rahne and Dani are looking into each other’s eyes and Rahne turns slightly (her eyes becoming just as they drew her in the comics), but with Dani accepting her and appreciating her. I oscillate between feeling this was appropriate and feeling it was rushed. But I’m not a teenager, and that’s a hard thing to call.
The film excels in the teenage horror of body dysmorphia and angsty need to find a partner. These kids ARE every teen going through sudden puberty in a pressure cooker with other teens. It does it well with each kid and I would have loved to see them do it with Xi’an, too.
The other change is Illyana. And it’s a doozy.
They give her Lockheed, which is kind of nice… Lockheed is her childhood puppet. But when she is in Limbo, he manifests as a real dragon. They also change Limbo into being Magik’s own pocket universe (instead of the Belasco-infested world she stepped into accidentally).
They changed her history to make her the victim of sexual abuse. They don’t explicitly say it, but it’s not a subtle element. It’s also a chance for another aspect of representation and of teenaged angst to be played out in superhero fiction.
I can’t recommend this film to fans of the MCU… or the X-Universe fans… or to fans of the comics. But I can recommend it for teenagers, dealing with their own bad lives right now.
There’s probably a two-hour cut of this movie that I would weep over. A cut that shows Dani’s life before the Demon Bear attack and the friends and neighbors she loses to her powers. One where we get two or three scenes between Rahne meeting Dani and Rahne kissing Dani. One with a less-racist Illyana. The one we got is just so hit and miss, and that’s a shame.
To find out where this film is available to stream, click here: Just Watch