So where the hell was this languishing for years? Seriously, The New Mutants is probably one of the best films in the "Fox" X-Men series and it was almost forgotten the instant it came out, despite several years of hype and re-edits. The New Mutants is pretty much exactly what I picture when I promote the idea of smaller, more nuanced, often cheaper, superhero cinema on this blog. There are maybe, ten actors in this film? Yet it manages to be more engaging, exciting and character-driven than many of the bigger ensemble films, especially in the X-Men series. Barely escaping some kind of supernatural attack, Dani Moonstar awakens in a mental hospital with four other teenage mutants, Rahne Sinclair, Ilyana Rasputin, Sam Guthrie and Roberto de Costa. Or, you know, Moonstar has been thrown in with mentally unstable versions of Wolfsbane, Magik, Cannonball and Sunspot. Now, I've never been a big X-Men fan, so I'm only passingly familiar with any of these characters, but I have to say I empathised with each of them pretty quickly and any changes that were made played to the strengths of the story, as far as I could tell.
Being a tight ninety minutes, The New Mutants doesn't waste much time trying to make the Essex Hospital (because references) seem at all innocent, with super-technology drops and strong supernatural horror beats pretty quickly. The links to the main X-Men films are pretty thin on the ground, which I like, because the last thing The New Mutants really needs is a Wolverine cameo that goes nowhere. Although there is almost no telling how much of the "original" film survived the various edits and re-shoots, the version of The New Mutants that's on my DVD copy really seems to trust the young actors with the material, and whilst the emotions are writ large, as suits both teen drama and comic books, the feelings read as genuine, and I can see plenty of adolescents connecting with this film just as I did with X-2 back in my day. Also I love that the queer characters are just kind of there, and their sexuality has nothing to do with why they are being hunted by nightmares, its just who they are.
Where the edits and reworking hurts The New Mutants the most is in the third act, where Dani is pushed to the background by Magik, because, by then, Anya Taylor-Joy had become famous through Peaky Blinders and The Queen's Gambit. I have mixed feelings about Taylor-Joy, as I suspect she's a pretty decent actor, but is constantly sexualised by the camera, so I simply cannot tell; a lot like a young Scarlet Johanssen, actually. Now the shift in focus in the film is not overly jarring, and there is an attempt to tie a "friends as surrogate family" narrative in at the end, but I wonder what a version of The New Mutants where Dani stayed in the fore would have looked like. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that Fox X-Men has wrapped up and won't be continuing, but The New Mutants is a high note to go out on and I really hope it gets some cult love at some point, as there is a lot to like, and not just for angsty teens. I know that I'll be going back to this long before others in the series myself, now that I know what's there.
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