Cinemutants - The New Mutants (2020)

At a time when superhero movies are starting to lose their stranglehold on pop culture, there are really only two options: go back and watch old movies, or kill off an entire cinematic universe in spectacular fashion. This July, Marvel’s taking the latter approach with Deadpool & Wolverine, which seems primed to seal off the 20th Century Fox film universe. And while director Shawn Levy promises, “This movie is built [...] with no obligation to come prepared with prior research,” skipping the research has never really been my strong suit when it comes to franchises. It’s a perfect excuse, then, to go through the last 24 years (and 13 movies) with everyone’s favorite mutants, the X-Men.

This week, from 2020, it’s The New Mutants. After a disaster that destroys her home, Dani Moonstar (Blu Hunt) wakes up in an abandoned hospital run by Dr. Cecilia Reyes (Alice Braga), who is attempting to rehabilitate a group of dangerous young mutants. Dani befriends Rahne Sinclair (Maisie Williams) before they discover that something in the hospital is trying to kill them and the other mutants – Illyana Rasputin (Anya Taylor-Joy), Roberto da Costa (Henry Zaga) and Sam Guthrie (Charlie Heaton).

1. Prepping us to be X-Men. I almost forgot about The New Mutants. I thought I’d miscounted my weeks when I saw Deadpool & Wolverine was still a week away. But I’d only seen New Mutants once, at home, three years ago, and while I felt wildly underwhelmed the first time, I felt a little bit sad that the X-franchise ended while on the verge of really trying something new. Not unlike the creative shot in the arm given when Chris Claremont introduced the team in 1982 (seven years into his run), The New Mutants felt a bit like we might finally stray away from the core team and explore other mutant characters, with a brand-new antagonist to tie both teams together in the end. But The New Mutants underperformed, Disney bought the franchise, and this one went from bold new beginning to forgotten coda, shelved and reshot for three years before a quiet mid-pandemic release. For a brief moment, the marketing for the film boasted that it was actually an entry in the MCU, but Marvel and Disney were quick to refute that claim.
2. Sum en limbo omnipotens. The casting in The New Mutants is mostly serviceable, with Hunt and Williams showing a remarkable amount of chemistry despite never quite feeling like their comics counterparts, Mirage and Wolfsbane. Yet Anya Taylor-Joy positively crackles as Illyana “Magik” Rasputin, the sister of Colossus. This iteration of Magik has a severe chip on her shoulder and a predilection for less-than-PC dialogue, but especially by the third act, when Magik cuts loose with her Soulsword and her dragon familiar Lockheed (previously and cleverly depicted as a hand puppet), one sorely regrets that we didn’t get more movies with her. (Whether she’s the sister of the Colossus we meet in Deadpool is one more mystery left sadly on the shelf.) She’s one casting holdover I would welcome into the MCU (or even a quick cameo in Deadpool & Wolverine), but I’m certain we’ll see genre darling Anya Taylor-Joy in some Marvel role before long.
3. A sinister future (reprise). It seems almost appropriate that trickster diva Mister Sinister gets yet another anticipatory tease that never materialized. An early draft of the film had Storm running the hospital in Professor X’s stead, and the final film certainly wants us to think that the X-Men are involved until a second-act reveal. Since New Mutants was filmed around the same time as Apocalypse and then deferred until after Deadpool 2, it’s little surprise to learn that the shady hospital is one more arm of the Essex Corporation, a fact neatly foreshadowed by Dr. Reyes’s diamond-shaped lapel pin. We also see Dr. Reyes pack a vial of blood into a suitcase just like the one we saw in the post-credits scene of Apocalypse. And for eagle-eyed viewers, we get a quick glimpse of footage from the child experiments in Logan, suggesting that Sinister might even have had his fingers in that scheme. (It muddles the timeline a bit, unless The New Mutants is set after Logan’s death, at which time there weren’t supposed to be any new mutants.) With the Essex House in Deadpool 2 taking in wayward mutants, it was all building to a big showdown with Mister Sinister, the unseen architect of the New Mutants’ pain.
4. So, we’re free? The film ends (spoiler warning?) with the New Mutants leaving the hospital, beginning a twenty-mile trek back to civilization. Evidently, this film was to be the first in a trilogy integrating the New Mutants into the X-franchise writ large, with a second film bringing them into contact with Warlock and the Technarchy, an alien race of techno-organic mutants. (We’d probably also have seen Doug “Cypher” Ramsey, a frequent partner and translator for Warlock.) By the third film, Mister Sinister would have made his proper debut, putting the mutant world through a film version of the “Inferno” crossover, which brought demons and the Goblin Queen into conflict with the X-Men. It’s hard not to imagine this Inferno as a kind of X-Men: Endgame, uniting the disparate subfranchises, but it might just as easily have become another Days of Future Past, struggling (in vain) to make sense of a newly-muddled timeline. Disney’s purchase of Fox, and the advent of a forthcoming Mutant Saga, put all those plans to bed. But still, it ain’t over until the TVA sings...
5. Checking in with the MCU. I don’t have too much more to say about The New Mutants, other than to wonder what might have happened if this film’s horror vibe were to run afoul of the Shadow King on Legion, a mutant-adjacent show that played with genre much more successfully. Maybe it’s time for a different kind of new mutant round-up. By my count, the MCU has brought us four, with only one living in the main universe of the Marvel Cinematic Multiverse. We’ve got Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani) as the first confirmed mutant, with some ambiguity about whether Namor (Tenoch Huerta) from Wakanda Forever is also a mutant. (He is in the comics, but I don’t recall the movie weighing in.) On parallel worlds, we’ve met versions of Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Beast (Kelsey Grammer), and a Binary version of Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch). While those three are probably being saved for a forthcoming Avengers multiversal film, I’d wager that any of them is fair game for Deadpool & Wolverine – depending on where Monica Rambeau landed in her fall through parallel worlds at the end of The Marvels. And of course, doors open from both sides, so who will Deadpool bring with him when he makes his way to Earth-616?

Sound off in the comments, true believers: did you ever see The New Mutants? If so, what do you remember about it? Up next, we’ll all see Deadpool & Wolverine for the first time. LFG, indeed.