Sunday, October 31, 2021

A Strange Halloween 4 - The New Mutants

A chance mutation causes you pain,
Eliminating all that you seek to gain,
Starting over becomes a must,
But not all around are folks you can trust

In likeminded people you might find your home,
A crew each with their own sins to atone,
But horrors abound like you wouldn’t believe,
Haunting your nightmares without a reprieve

It’s time to come face-to-face with your fear,
Else you friends won’t make it far from here,
Your nightmares made flesh or try to deceive,
It’s a Strange Halloween on All Hallows Eve


It’s time to look at The New Mutants, the final film from the Fox X-men line. It’s an X-men film that had a pretty troubled production. The idea was initially pitched in 2014, and was filmed in 2017, Professor X was originally going to be in this but was written out alongside various other x-men being slated to make an appearance, though these ideas were ultimately dropped. Fox was expecting for the film to undergo substantial reshoots, getting the film pushed back from its initial 2018 release date. But their efforts were delayed by the Disney-Fox acquisition and by the time Disney had completed their takeover, reshoots were no longer an option as the young cast had aged out of the roles. Still, Disney wasn’t exactly impressed with the product and did some work to increase the horror tone, which was more in-line with the original vision of writer/director Josh Boone.

Still, at this point the film had not been fully edited, and Boone was busy working on a Steven King adaptation, so he brought on editor Andrew Buckland to finish the film. The film was set to be released in March 2020 but a little thing known as COVID-19 saw it delayed yet again to August. Even then, this was Disney knowing this wasn’t going to be successful and cutting their losses.

And they may have been right, the film got a pretty bad 35% Rating on Rotten Tomatoes and whilst it may have more outside of a pandemic, it made only $47m on it’s near $80m budget. Don’t think it would’ve been that successful either way, so let’s take a look and see what I thought…

But before we do, we have to address a couple of issues. First off, this film was on the shelves for the best part of 3 years and they didn’t correct a typo crediting the comics’ original writer until after he pointed it out, if that’s any indication of how little Disney cared, this is gonna be a long one. Then we have to talk about the race thing, the casting of non-black Brazilian for an intentionally Black Character like Robbie Da-Costa is… disappointing given that racism was a part of his origin story. That’s as much as I have to say on the subject of casting, let’s get into the story.

Dani Morningstar (Blu Hunt) is told to hide as an unseen monster destroys her entire village, killing everyone. She wakes up in a special facility for mutants alongside Wolf-shifter Rahne Sinclear (Maisie Williams), Sorceress Ilyana Rasputin (Anya Taylor Joy), human cannonball Sam Gunthrie (Charlie Heaton) and Pyro-kinetic Robbie Da-Costa (Henry Zaga). Their Doctor, Cecilia Reyes (Alice Braga) has brought them to the facility and trapped them within a force-field to study and help them control their powers, they believe as the first stage of joining the X-men.

But Dani is unaware of the true nature of her powers and as they begin to manifest, no-one is safe.

It’s actually interesting to try and branch super-heroes into the horror Genre. It’s not done all that often and not without good reason but this is a unique opportunity, keeping the action limited to a small area keeps the budget from getting too high and there’s of opportunity to explore character through the manifested fears…

Unfortunately, a few things hold it back, the first of which is the runtime. A horror movie is generally one of the more slow-paced movie genres. This movie has a fairly breezy plot, which would normally be okay, but it’s way too fast-paced for a horror film. The scares don’t have the opportunity to be scary because they’re over with too quickly. And that’s my problem with the characters too. Sam and Robbie do not get enough to chew on, we hear a little about their background but since their scares neither drive the plot forward nor their arcs it feels like fluff. The other thing is the PG-13 rating meaning the violence was largely implied rather than shown. I’m not expecting a gore fest and in places this does stretch the PG-13 rating but implied violence is less scary.

Dani is obviously the central character, her presence is what’s driving the conflict more than the actual antagonist, Doctor Reyes. Her father told her a story about the 2 bears in every person, one that encompasses positive emotional thinking, and one that encompasses negative thinking. The moral it’s the one you feed that wins which is honestly kinda basic, Inside Out did better with this. [Note: This is actually based on a real Native American story so... take what I said with a pinch of salt]

Rahne’s arc is about coming to terms with herself and what that means for her religion. Personally if someone representing my religion branded me and called me a witch I would probably tell that religion to f*ck off, but maybe that’s my atheism talking. She’s Dani’s primary love interest also, but there was a lot of drama they could have mined over Dani being inadvertently responsible for manifesting her fears in a physical sense, she was branded again, that’s potentially traumatising!

Ilyana is the most interesting character in the movie, bar none. Her powers of sorcery or something is one of the most visually interesting and her character rubbing off against some of the others made for some decent character banter. Her story is a little vague, and I feel like this may have one of the compromises for the PG-13 rating. Her fear also had consequence outside of her own mind and body as it was one of the enemies everyone had to fight. Though Ilyana forgiving Dani for (accidentally) bringing her nightmare to life after never liking her to begin with is just perplexing.

Doctor Reyes had the advantage of not having to be a particularly memorable antagonist, as Dani’s powers were the main source of conflict. Still, it’s strange that she didn’t experience any of the Dani’s nightmares during the course of the film. She had to sleep at some point, hell she was drugged asleep at one point. Her character feels kinda one-note. Oh, and she works for Mr Sinister, who I feel should default at harvest genetics and kill, since that’s kinda his whole thing, cute how they worked that into a reference to Logan, not that it ultimately matters.

New Mutants is solid but unremarkable, definitely over-hated in some circles. Its plot is serviceable, its characters are largely shallow but there’s some credence to them and each with a solid performance behind them (even with Charlie Heaton putting on a fake-sounding accent), but since their characters aren’t explored enough, their fears feel underdeveloped, with only 2 of them really getting a chance to fight them.

Rating 55/100

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