The New Mutants
Year: 2020
Director: Josh Boone
Starring: Alice Braga, Charlie Heaton, Blu Hunt, Anya Taylor-Joy, Maisie Williams & Henry Zaga
Runtime: 100 mins
BBFC: 15
Published: 01/09/20
Director: Josh Boone
Starring: Alice Braga, Charlie Heaton, Blu Hunt, Anya Taylor-Joy, Maisie Williams & Henry Zaga
Runtime: 100 mins
BBFC: 15
Published: 01/09/20
It’s been a rough ride for X-Men fans over the past few years. Aside from the simply incredible Logan we got two underwhelming films in Apocalypse and Dark Phoneix (I’m not as harsh on them as many other critics, but they certainly weren’t great films). On top of that the promising looking The New Mutants got delayed indefinitely because of the Fox/Disney merger. The film had gone through production hell before that massive spanner in the works, and then when the film didn’t fit in with Disney’s family friendly aesthetic it was shelved indefinitely until the studio could work out what to do with it.
But three years after it was due to release, The New Mutants is finally here, and it is the final Fox X-Men film we will ever get. It’s almost entirely separate from anything that’s come before (save a small easter egg that links it to Logan), so is it really worth investing your time into a film that was dead before it even got off the ground and has no chance of being resurrected?
The New Mutants is about Dani Moonstar, a teenage girl that awakes in a hospital for young mutants following a disaster that killed her entire tribe. The hospital, headed by Doctor Reyes, has the purpose of helping new mutants overcome psychological problems surrounding the traumatic discovery of their powers that if left unchecked could cause them to harm themselves or others.
However, when the youngsters start having vivid hallucinations surrounding their traumatic pasts, they begin to question what their purpose at this ‘hospital’ really is and whether it is actually even designed to help them.
The X-Men films have always done a pretty good job at illustrating the damage the discovery of an individual’s powers can be, both to themselves and the people around them. I mean, Bryan Singer’s original X-Men film in 2000 opened with Rogue discovering her powers and putting her boyfriend in a coma because of it. But The New Mutants takes this trauma to new levels with its depiction of death, torture, and sexual assault. Whilst some of the backstories characters have are not any worse than you’d find in a normal X-Men film, some of them are understandably incredibly damaging to these individuals and go to some pretty dark places.
But three years after it was due to release, The New Mutants is finally here, and it is the final Fox X-Men film we will ever get. It’s almost entirely separate from anything that’s come before (save a small easter egg that links it to Logan), so is it really worth investing your time into a film that was dead before it even got off the ground and has no chance of being resurrected?
The New Mutants is about Dani Moonstar, a teenage girl that awakes in a hospital for young mutants following a disaster that killed her entire tribe. The hospital, headed by Doctor Reyes, has the purpose of helping new mutants overcome psychological problems surrounding the traumatic discovery of their powers that if left unchecked could cause them to harm themselves or others.
However, when the youngsters start having vivid hallucinations surrounding their traumatic pasts, they begin to question what their purpose at this ‘hospital’ really is and whether it is actually even designed to help them.
The X-Men films have always done a pretty good job at illustrating the damage the discovery of an individual’s powers can be, both to themselves and the people around them. I mean, Bryan Singer’s original X-Men film in 2000 opened with Rogue discovering her powers and putting her boyfriend in a coma because of it. But The New Mutants takes this trauma to new levels with its depiction of death, torture, and sexual assault. Whilst some of the backstories characters have are not any worse than you’d find in a normal X-Men film, some of them are understandably incredibly damaging to these individuals and go to some pretty dark places.
The whole allure of The New Mutants was that it was supposed to be a horror film set in a world where superheroes exist. This hadn’t really been attempted before 2018’s Brightburn, and unfortunately The New Mutants is completely underwhelming as a horror because it simply fails to be scary. All the horror elements fail to have the scare factor to them because they do not abide by the basic principles of horror filmmaking regarding building tension up slowly over time. Instead we’ll go from an action sequence to a scary scene without any time for reprieve, so when the scary moment comes, we are still in the action movie mindset and as a result it falls flat. Not to mention none of the scary things are actually scary in design. The scariest moment of the whole film takes place in a pool and it would have worked quite well if the monster that appears hadn’t been so badly designed.
So, what does go in The New Mutants favour if the horror is pretty lacklustre? Well I think all the performances are pretty good. The real standout performance to me is Illy, played by Anya Taylor-Joy. She started off as this really irritating character who was just angsty for the sake of it, but over the course of the film she grew on me and Taylor-Joy’s performance as her was a pretty solid one. Maisie Williams as Rahne was also a strong performance. Although I was disappointed that we didn’t get more development on her love interest storyline as I felt that it was introduced quite well and then just immediately forgotten about.
I’d say the weakest performance comes from Charlie Heaton as Sam and that’s mostly because I know what Charlie Heaton is capable of, Stranger Things gave me high expectations for him, but in this film he doesn’t do an awful lot so I feel like he was kind of wasted. But even so, the scenes where he was doing things he did good.
Overall, The New Mutants is average at best. It’s better than I feel most critics are giving it credit for, but it’s nothing to really write home about. It’s the type of film that X-Men fans will probably watch once and then never go back to, and it’ll have nothing to interest anybody not already committed to that film series. It’s going to slip under a lot of people’s radars because there’s almost no marketing material for the film so it seems like Disney want to sneak it out on the quiet and hopes nobody notices. It certainly deserves praise for not being awful, because as I previously stated, this film was finished three years ago but just never got released because Disney just didn't know what to do with it. That's usually a sign that the film would be terrible, but it actually ended up being more enjoyable than X-Men: Dark Phoenix for example. It’s truly a shame that it wasn't better than it currently is as The New Mutants could have been great if it had been given a director who understood horror films (and not been helmed by the guy who directed The Fault in Our Stars), and if Disney had put in the effort to drum up some kind of excitement for this film. In all honesty though, I’m surprised it ever got to see the light of day and I can say that I’m happy I finally got to see it.
So, what does go in The New Mutants favour if the horror is pretty lacklustre? Well I think all the performances are pretty good. The real standout performance to me is Illy, played by Anya Taylor-Joy. She started off as this really irritating character who was just angsty for the sake of it, but over the course of the film she grew on me and Taylor-Joy’s performance as her was a pretty solid one. Maisie Williams as Rahne was also a strong performance. Although I was disappointed that we didn’t get more development on her love interest storyline as I felt that it was introduced quite well and then just immediately forgotten about.
I’d say the weakest performance comes from Charlie Heaton as Sam and that’s mostly because I know what Charlie Heaton is capable of, Stranger Things gave me high expectations for him, but in this film he doesn’t do an awful lot so I feel like he was kind of wasted. But even so, the scenes where he was doing things he did good.
Overall, The New Mutants is average at best. It’s better than I feel most critics are giving it credit for, but it’s nothing to really write home about. It’s the type of film that X-Men fans will probably watch once and then never go back to, and it’ll have nothing to interest anybody not already committed to that film series. It’s going to slip under a lot of people’s radars because there’s almost no marketing material for the film so it seems like Disney want to sneak it out on the quiet and hopes nobody notices. It certainly deserves praise for not being awful, because as I previously stated, this film was finished three years ago but just never got released because Disney just didn't know what to do with it. That's usually a sign that the film would be terrible, but it actually ended up being more enjoyable than X-Men: Dark Phoenix for example. It’s truly a shame that it wasn't better than it currently is as The New Mutants could have been great if it had been given a director who understood horror films (and not been helmed by the guy who directed The Fault in Our Stars), and if Disney had put in the effort to drum up some kind of excitement for this film. In all honesty though, I’m surprised it ever got to see the light of day and I can say that I’m happy I finally got to see it.