So after this, I realised that New Mutants was on Disney+, and having a cold I decided I’d rather waste an hour and a half of my life in favour of doing more productive things that I had to do.
My end verdict, overall: it’s fine. It’s a movie and I watched it. I definitely don’t care enough about it to watch it again, but I’m not angry at the movie or myself for deciding to watch it.
The acting was a little bit all over the place - mostly just sort of there with no abjectly terrible performances.
Illyana probably stood out the most because she was given the most to do (that wasn’t just looking pensive).
Now I’m going to just nitpick and criticise, so here we go in no particular order:
Coming back round to Illyana - her character and how they framed her was super inconsistent.
It’s implied that the smiling men from her nightmares appear monstrous because of memories distorted by trauma - they gloss over her strong hatred of humans (literally comes up toward the end reading from her file); they have what looks like tattoos you’d associate with Russian organised crime; Limbo isn’t a real place but something she made up?
But there’s no explicit realisation there, or her showing that she knows they were only men doing monstrous things instead of actual monsters.
How the hell did she “make up” Limbo? If she made it up why does she have to chant in Latin? I have mixed feelings about her using the Lockheed puppet as a crutch of sorts, but when the (incongruously cute) Lockheed showed up at the end it just raised so many more questions - it seemed to imply that it was the puppet come to life, so Illyana is a reality manipulator now?
Following on from this, the characters know Dani for all of two days and abruptly they’re all ready to die for her. Risking their lives to save her from her own powers no less. Some of that is consistent characterisation, Rahne was down bad for instance, so that’s fine. Illyana though, she spends the majority of the movie being antagonistic to Dani to the point of caricature, then does a 180 because it’s needed for the climax.
The “two bears” story that they bring up, I’m curious if it’s actually legitimate in any way or something fabricated for the narrative.
Every time it came up it made me remember the “two wolves” bit that floats around the internet, which again, I’m not sure whether it’s in any way legitimate.
The CGI has a sort of unfinished look to it, which tracks along with the fact that there were no reshoots to tidy up scenes or improve narrative flow - the movie was sort of abandoned.
I came across this as well:
So this follows on to a couple of points.
First, the Roberto whitewashing is an issue but not one that even occurred to me because, well, the comics pretty much got there first. Someone in the development stage would have been aware that he started out as black, but I don’t think this was ever going to be the movie to revert that change for the wider audience.
Second, I can understand that he wouldn’t have chosen to go with a horror movie to introduce the characters, but my issue was that they didn’t commit to it. There’s a sort of wishy washy horror aesthetic going on, but if they went all in on a creeping psychological dread I feel like it would have helped a lot. I know they would have wanted to keep the rating down, but I’m sure they could have snuck some mild body horror in for Rahne and possibly Roberto - highlight that mutations can be physically and mentally horrific to live with.
(Bonus third point there - the name misspelling is a fair indication of the care and attention this movie got in the final production stages.)
So overall, it’s just sort of there. Had the movie not been abandoned as far as post-production goes it would have been a better movie for sure, but a lot of what makes it a forgettable movie seems baked into how they approached the story and characters.
I would like to append a photo of this moment in the movie, which made me internally cringe so hard that I may have suffered lasting harm.
