Movie Review: The New Mutants

I took my kids to the Mansfield Drive-In Movie Theater last night to see the New Mutants.  A great experience overall but probably not one that we would repeat on anything like a regular basis, mostly because the theater itself was over an hour’s drive away.  Needless to say, this was my kids’ first experience with a drive-in.  We brought lawn chairs but forgot to bring a boom box and thus learned the hard way that my car’s speakers aren’t as loud as I might’ve hoped when you’re sitting outside.  Volume issues affected our enjoyment of the film, unfortunately.  It was hard to hear at times.  Still, we all enjoyed ourselves quite a bit.  

New Mutants is a fun film.  However, it’s hardly a great piece of cinematic film making, and it suffers from the fact that Marvel/Disney clearly has no plans to proceed with what was obviously intended to be first-in-franchise production.  The movie runs an hour-forty, and that’s plenty of time to tell its base story, but there’s not much in the way of backstory anywhere, and a lot of plot threads that might’ve set up future story elements have either been dropped or, I suspect, removed to make this a more effective standalone piece.  For example, it’s not a spoiler to say that classic X-Men villain Mr. Sinister is theoretically the big bad here.  In fact, Mr. Sinister is never mentioned at all, not even in a post-credits scene that might’ve given some context to the film’s events.

I’ve been a fan of the New Mutants comic book since its inception.  I remember being in fourth or fifth grade and being blown away by the idea of younger, less trained X-Men.  A lot of the New Mutants were just out-and-out bad at using their powers, especially in the book’s early going.  That idea seemed so raw and dangerous when I was a kid, and indeed, New Mutants is often a raw, edgy, terrifying book.  Add in that the first New Mutants story appeared in a standalone graphic novel with amazing art, and the whole thing just felt like an event.

The Mansfield Drive-In Theater, main screen

New Mutants the movie adapts one of the best early stories, “The Demon Bear Saga,” which ran from issue #18 to issue #20 way back in 1984.  Probably the biggest failing of the movie is that it helps quite a bit to know going in who the main characters are, what they can do, and why you should be both scared of and scared for each of them in turn.

By issue #18 in the comics, the original team had come together, established its identity both individually and corporately, and had enough run-ins with legitimate danger to feel justifiably confident of success in the face of terrifying adversity.  Alas, the film is so focused on the story at hand that we never learn anything humanizing about many of its characters.  This is a story set a year-and-a-half into a classic comic run, and the film just doesn’t make enough accommodations to its origin story.  Some of that stuff is maybe given a half-line here or there, but I’ll bet that neither of my kids can explain what Sunspot can do, nor will they understand the shame behind his constant boasting about being rich and a ladies’ man.  A lot of that origin stuff -- even important story information like the fact that Magik’s mutant power is teleportation, but most of what she can do she learned the hard way like Dr. Strange -- just didn’t make the cut.  Thus, when we see demons from Limbo or even Limbo itself, there’s no emotional resonance.  We get that Illyana is scared, and we get those demons look scary, but we have zero context for her will to fight them, and why is she carrying a lightsaber?

I know the answers, obviously.  My kids, however, got confused.

“The Demon Bear Saga” was probably most notable because it introduced Bill Sienkiewicz as the series’s artist.  Sienkiewicz’s style was a perfect match for the weird, otherworldly story writer Chris Claremont was trying to tell, and indeed, it’s Sienkiewicz over time who gave New Mutants its signature look.  These are quasi-superhero stories, maybe, but Sienkiewicz draws them in a decidedly dark, eldritch, horror-comic style.  A lot of that comes through in the movie, thankfully.  Even thirty years later and translated into another medium, it’s still Sienkiewicz’s style that makes this story work.  That’s remarkable.

Anyway, if you know the characters, this is a perfectly serviceable New Mutants story.  There are some changes, sure, and both Magma and Karma are both missing, but whatever.  I enjoyed myself.  However, I really wouldn’t recommend going into this one cold.  Read some of the book first, and I think you’ll enjoy yourself immensely more.  Start here.