Nothing can stop the New Mutants, except fake reshoots, corporate mergers, national pandemics, etc. As the movie continued facing delays, anticipation built for a film that some feared would never come as Fox’s X-Men franchise was coming to an end. Now, New Mutants has finally been released in theaters for audiences to enjoy but was it worth the wait? New Mutants came with many promises, for example, that there would be a heavy horror influence and a young adult vibe with their younger cast members. Let’s dissect what promises the movie was able to keep.
Spoilers ahead for the recently released New Mutants movie.
A big problem for New Mutants is that it could never decide who its audience actually is. While the actors feel like they enjoy playing their characters, the story lacks any real momentum as it lacks any real structure. The first and second acts take their time to let the audience get to know the characters through flashbacks, hauntings, and interactions between each other. Dani Moonstar is the biggest driver of the mystery as the audience and characters do not know her powers, yet the hauntings seem to happen whenever she has some intense emotion. In fact, the audience spends much of the first act learning what each character’s powers are as they face off against their fears. Even though these are not the big X-Men characters everyone is familiar with, longtime fans of the New Mutants are familiar with these characters’ abilities. It’s only natural for movies to introduce characters to audience members who may not be aware of them, but New Mutants really drags its feet with informing the audience about the characters. Throughout the movie, the audience learns a little bit about a character, and then that character pulls back and gets defensive. Then the movie moves onto the next character, who also gets defensive after the audience learns something about their backstory. The pacing of the movie overall makes it feel like the pilot for a TV show (maybe because the director was hoping for this to be a trilogy). Unfortunately, all the build up throughout the movie feels wasted as there are not going to be any sequels for these characters, and the movie spent too much time building up the characters rather than trying to make the characters great in a great story. Even though it feels like New Mutants is for new audiences, there are still plenty of things that are hardly explained for those unfamiliar with the characters. No attempt is really made to explain how Illyana’s powers work or how her connection to Limbo works or how Lockheed turns into a real dragon. The Demon Bear ends up being the real main antagonist of the movie, except it comes across as more of an Easter egg than a villain after the build up of pseudo antagonist Dr. Reyes throughout the movie. In the end, New Mutants spends too much time building up the characters to feel like it is for long time fans while not explaining its more complex concepts for its newer audience.
The movie also never fully appeals to the horror audience that its marketing tried to attract either. The horror elements are present throughout with the haunting monsters that appear in the hospital and the creepy “always being watched” atmosphere delivered by the cameras constantly focused on them. The monsters feel incredibly campy, however, with the most frightening monsters feeling like a pale Slender Man rip off. The different fear creatures never feel like a threat to the characters, in part because the characters all feel stronger than what is haunting them and also the monsters never feel particularly strong as well. Even though the monsters can cause physical harm to the characters, it is quite obvious that they are just illusions with the way they quickly disappear. The characters also constantly shift how scared they actually are of the haunting going on, which contradicts the pacing a horror movie typically undergoes which slowly builds up the fear the characters are going through as more and more frightening things happen. Dr. Reyes also never feels like a threat to the characters, just a staff member that is following the orders of her superior, serving her master with her barrier powers. The real villain of the movie feels like it is going to be the man behind the Essex Corporation, except that man is never revealed. Again, this is likely due to the movie building towards a sequel that will never come, but even if the sequel were coming, this build hurt this New Mutants movie. When Demon Bear is revealed as the final act villain by killing Dr. Reyes, it does not feel like the culmination of the story that has been told up to this point, but rather the new monster feels like a Diabolus ex Machina for the characters to overcome at the end of the movie to show how much the characters have bonded throughout. More campy than frightening, New Mutants fell into the trope that many superhero films succumb to of everyone taking on the big bad villain one at a time to showcase their powers and how the cast has come together throughout the conflict. The final act feels completely stripped of the horror elements that were spread throughout the first two acts, failing to fulfill the promise New Mutants had as a horror movie that could take advantage of the powers its characters have.
With all that being said, New Mutants is not the worst X-Men movie, and there are still some salvageable, good moments as well. Anya Taylor-Joy really steals the show as Illyana Rasputin throughout, being the most visually interesting in both her appearance and powers. While the rest of the cast has more muted performances, her snarky and biting personality stands out in every scene that she is in. Being the least explained character in the cast, her character’s motivation is unclear as she seems to pick on the rest of the cast for her own amusement. Even though her character is very powerful, her own flaws get in the way of making any connections with the rest of the characters imprisoned in the hospital with her, communicating with her puppet Lockheed as her sense of comfort. While the rest of the characters hold some false sense of hope that they can be X-Men once they leave the hospital, Illyana understands that she is not the type of person the X-Men would want given her dark past. Her powers, while never being properly explained, are also visually interesting from summoning her armor and Soulsword, to teleporting, and even the brief glimpses of Limbo are bright compared to their dull hospital surroundings. In fact, the visual effects throughout the movie are all exciting as the director seems to have picked these characters so that they could display their impressive powers. Sam’s propulsion powers showcase how much power he has, as well as how dangerous they can be to himself and others every time they are activated. Roberto’s fire controlling powers could have been something we had seen before in other superhero movies, but his “dark form” stood out amongst the darker background colors. All of Dani’s fear illusions, while not always threatening or frightening, stood out with their pointed designs as probably some sort of nightmare fuel for kids that saw the movie. The Demon Bear’s appearance of a dark storm cloud coming together felt like a destructive force in the final act of the movie. I wish the movie had given us more of the Demon Bear, maybe better structuring the film with the Demon Bear on the hunt for Dani rather than popping up towards the end of the movie. New Mutants is filled with good ideas though, unfortunately, it never seems to reach its potential, which is only multiplied by the fact that audiences had to wait so long before they could see the movie. If fans were getting more with these characters, New Mutants would be considered the dull start of a spin-off series, but as is, New Mutants is just the unmemorable end to Fox’s X-Men universe.
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