The New Mutants Review (Contains spoilers)

Yesterday was something of a cinematic milestone as I finally got to see a film that has been awaiting release for over 3 years Josh Boones 'The New Mutants' and the story behind the film is more interesting than the actual film!

History of the project

Way back before the mighty mouse empire (Disney) took over and then 'rebranded' Twentieth Century Fox as 20th Century Studios, Fox still owned the rights to the Xmen cinematic universe and continued to churn out new Xmen films of varying quality every few years.

The first X-men film is now 20 years old and director Bryan Singer had a massive success with the first 2 original X-men films before he left the last chapter to Brett Ratner and Simon Kinberg to ruin as they fucked up two films worth of storytelling leading to a disappointing conclusion to the Dark Phoenix storyline. The focus was then shifted to Hugh Jackmans 'Wolverine' and despite a poor 1st film his trilogy ended with the excellent 'Logan' directed by James Mangold which really should have been an oscar nominated film for Jackman, Stewart and Daphne Keen.

Concurrently a relaunch of the main series was masterminded by Matthew Vaughan with X-Men First Class another highlight, set in the 1960's with a new younger cast featuring outstanding work by Michael Fassbender as Magneto and up and coming stars like Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult and James McAvoy. However Vaughn had other plans and departed before the sequel 'Days of Future Past' leaving Fox to turn to former director Bryan Singer to shepard the story forward, I'd argue that 'Days of Future Past' works despite Singers involvement as his various off camera problems mounted up.

Next Singer and writer Kinberg bastardized the classic 'Age of Apocalypse' storyline line but trying to condense it into one absolutely terrible film, one of the many issue was that because Jennifer Lawrence had become an oscar winning superstar her character of Mystique's influence had been given more and more in each film to the detriment of the original story, Apocalypse was just that for the Xmen franchise.

Even Singer had enough after the terrible Apocalypse and writer Simon Kinberg (who had already messed up the Dark Phoenix storyline once with X-men 3) got another chance to fix his mistakes with his first directing job on 'Dark Phoenix'. It was terrible despite a decent performance from Sophie Turner in the Jean Grey role with Kinberg clearly out of his depth from production stories online and the studio cutting the budget of the film during production. Once finished the film took a year in post to finall y get released, this was partly due to the studio knowing they had a bomb on their hands and also the sale of Twentieth Century Fox to Disney who would now be releasing the film.

The film was eventually released in 2019 and was widely regarded as a failure and the end of the Xmen saga at Fox before Disney / Marvel would begin to reboot the series under their ownership, except there was the small matter of another small relatively low budget X-men film to be released 'The New Mutants'.

Filmmaker Josh Boone was widely known for his hit romantic drama 'The Fault in Our Stars' so he was not everyones first choice but the work on this film begun while the stink of X-men Apocalypse was still fresh and filming took place in 2017 and then the Disney acquistion of Fox put the film on the shelf for 3 years.

The initial trailer promised this would be the first X-men horror movie, with its asylum setting and many references that this would hue closer in tone to something like 'A Nightmare on Elm Street: Dream Warriors' than typical superhero fare. Apparently Fox were not happy with the footage they saw and took Boone off the project while they planned reshoots, with the takeover this never happened and Disney finally brough Boone back to fix his film and deliver his original vision.

The New Mutants is a decent enough little film and it feels like a much smaller film which I enjoyed to a certain degree, the budget constraints are clear for all to see with the whole film taking place in one location and the success of the film lives and dies on the shoulders on its young cast.

The basic plot of the film follows young Dani Moonstar who wakes to a monster chasing her and her father through a forest before he is killed and Dani is attacked. She wakes up in facility for troubled young mutants run by the obviously evil Dr Reyes who just wants to 'help them'and once Dani arrives we are introduced to the rest of her fellow young mutants.

The film then takes us through each new character and gives us a little info on what their power is without fully explaining any of them and then gives us the broad strokes of what their trauma is that led to them being in the facility.

Cast

Blu Hunt as Dani Moonstar

Notably she was cast because she is actually native american playing a native american character, despite being in her mid twenties she believably plays an awkward teenager and we follow her story as the film progresses as she learns about her power and develops her relationship with Maise Williams 'Rahne Sinclair. We learn that Dani's power is unfortunately to make anyone near her's worst fears come to life, this begins to manifest itself early on and the audience is always a least 3 steps ahead of the characters in the film.

Maisie Williams as Rahne Sinclair

Fresh of the biggest show of all time in Game of Thrones this was originally going to be Williams first post GOT role, at first I couldn't place her accent until her 2nd scene when I finally realised she was supposed to be Irish. Not knowing the New Mutants comic storylines Rahne's power is apparently to turn into a dog, not as massive killer wolf of the like, just a regular dog at least in this film - I'm guessing thats down to budget constraints otherwise its a pretty shit X-men power.

After various scenes of checking each other out in the shower Rahne & Dani start a quite sweet PG rated relationship which is the crux of the start of the film. Williams underplays fairly well but she really isn't given much to do in the script and it would have been nice to learn more about her being branded as a witch by a religious figure that haunts her later in the film.

Charlie Heaton as Sam Guthrie

Stranger Things Charlie Heaton gets to channel his inner red neck as Cannonball even though that name is never used in the film! So basically he can fly around a little bit and again the limits of his powers are never explained and all we know about him (other than a southern accent) is that he caused a mine cave in by accident killing his father and he injures himself when he uses his powers which is the extent of his character development.

Henry Zaga as Bobby Acosta

There is no picture of Henry Zaga as every picture of him seemed to be a modelling picture and thats essentially his character in the film! He is a low rent Johnny Storm who has intimacy issues as he burned his girlfriend to death when they were doing it. Other than that his only character traits are he is rich, good looking, provides terrible one liners and spends most of his time in the kitchen for no discernable reason.

Anya Taylor-Joy as Illiana Rasputin

And from the worst character to the best as Anya Taylor-Joy has a ball playing the psychotic murdering Illiana Rasputin younger sister of Colossus (last seen as comic relief in Deadpool). Joy is head and shoulders above the rest of the cast in performance and gets all the best lines in the film while talking to her puppet Lockheed and its looks like all the SFX budget went on her scenes!

However I have no idea what her powers are supposed to be!? Her arm turns into a sword and armour covers her body and then she teleports back and forth from a hell dimension of some kind? It all looks really cool and I would really appreciated some more backstory and explanation of her powers. Marvel put her in your new X-men films!

Alice Braga as Dr Reyes

As apparently the only staff memeber in the whole facility we know Reyes is up to no good from the moment we meet her and that she works for the shadowy Essex organisation where it is her job to assess wayward teen mutants and send the most promising (read deadly!) onwards and to kill the others as we can tell from the massive graveyard in the hospital grounds. Her power is she can create forcefields which keeps the kids in the facility and thats all we learn about her as she is given zero character development and bar trying to kill Dani at one point doesn't even do anything remotely evil.

Pros

- It is a much better film than Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix combined

- Bonus points for having the characters watching classic episodses of Buffy The Vampire in particular a moment between Willow & Tara watched intently by Rahne that informs us on her character

- It is more character drama than superhero film largely due to budget but this makes the drama work better

- Nice slowburn at the start of the film as a nice believable relationship develops between Dani & Rahne

- Anya Taylor-Joy was awesome as Illiana

Cons

- It is more character drama than horror film which was promised by the early trailers and despite the 15 rating it was never scary and no way horrific enough for a nightmare film

- Terrible partying montage where apparently eating some popcorn, drinking and dancing badly is a massive act of teen rebellion

- Maisie Williams dodgy Irish accent

- Is Dr Reyes the only staff member at the hospital as she is the only one we see throughout the film

- Did the kids never think if they teamed up and combined their powers they could defeat Reyes, I was just waiting for the line where they said 'But we can beat her together' and it never happened.

- Isolation as a punishment scene doesn't make any sense when all the kids have to be locked up in their own rooms at night anyway, so they are punished by being put in two differnt yet still seperate rooms?

- Roberto is terrible and his whole character is pointless in the film

- How is turning into a regular dog an xmen worthy power?

- Despite being awesome as Illiana it feels like Taylor-Joy is being set up for her own spinoff that will never happen now.

Finally

The New Mutants is not the disaster many people would have you believe and at its core its a slow burn drama about five teenagers figuring out their powers and traumas. The performances range from the sublime (Anya Taylor-Joy) to the absymsal (Henry Zaga), their powers are never clearly explained and the whole film takes place in the one location. Where this helps is that without much world building or tie ins to the larger X-universe its feels like its own film. For a horror it is nowhere near scary enough and the budget feels very small for an X-men film, though the few SFX scenes Taylor-Joy has are impressive.

Overall I can't help thinking this would have worked better as a 10 part Netfix show with the same director and then each episode could have focused on the background of one character entirely (like the Haunting of Hill House) while building the larger season narrative.