The Film Canary - The New Mutants

It's very hard these days to approach a big studio film without preconceptions.  In this age of internet muckraking clickbaiting scu- erm, I mean 24/7 film journalism, you can often build up in your head quite a picture of a movie from all the sneak peaks, reveals at conventions, big news stories etc. way before you see it.  That isn't helped from entertainment press' urge to make every little thing that happens a big deal, portraying it as some sort of crisis, nearly always making mountains out of molehills.  For example, reshoots happen all of the time, they're not really that big a deal, and often they do work out for the best.  However, I think it's safe to say that The New Mutants is a case when the exaggeration wasn't that necessary, this thing seems to have been straight up cursed from the luck it's had, to the point that I'd only be half joking if I was to say that it feels like the outbreak of a pandemic was par for the course given it's luck.  That trailer below, the April 13th release date at the end?  That was originally April 13th 2018!  I am an amateur that takes this seriously though, so I'm writing this before going in to say that I am going to judge this purely on the state of the finished product.  There have been films made that were nightmares to shoot that you wouldn't have guessed from their completed state, so I'm going to set aside my foreknowledge of the troubled history of this one in watching it as best as I can.  If I do bring it up again, it will be purely to say whether or not the film transcends these problems, or if they really impact the finished article.  Right, into the cinema, with mask and hand sanitiser ready, let's see how it's turned out.

:One viewing later:

Well, I'm going to be bringing up the whole troubled production thing A LOT, and not because the film transcended it.

I think that it's a major warning sign that the two comic book movies I find myself thinking of the most in relation to The New Mutants are Green Lantern and Fant4stic.  Starting with the former, this movie has one of the worst cases of "And Then" storytelling I've seen in a major motion picture since Ryan Reynolds' first, widely mocked by him venture into superhero cinema.  I don't like using a term coined by the South Park guys, but I think it does work quite well; "And Then" storytelling is when, in looking at the individual scenes of a story, if the words "And Then" belong between those beats, the story is pretty poorly constructed.  Ideally, you want words like "therefore", "but", "because", you want the scenes to actually flow together, consequences to carry over, events to build on top of each other, that sort of thing.  If you don't, a lot of the story ends up feeling just like it's sort of bumbling around aimlessly, and The New Mutants is bumble tastic.  The whole thing just sort of chugs along, with the characters' relationships to each other and the main story not flowing naturally at all.  One scene they're at each other's throats, then they're OK with each other, or one moment there's a big scare scene, and the next they're just laughing and hanging out.  It honestly feels like after the first five minutes, and before the final twenty, you could pretty much rearrange the scenes at random, and it wouldn't make much of a difference.  I could forgive this to a degree if the scenes were any good... alas!

Now as for why I'm thinking of Fant4stic, as well as it being a proposed start to a series exploding on the launchpad, it's because this is another one of those cases where it's hard to tell if the editing, reshoots, or script are more to blame.  It's very clear it's been fiddled with at some point, as there are a lot of plot confusions about what's causing all the danger in the film; the film settles on one definite cause, but some of the monsters and threats that turn up really don't behave like that makes sense.  Also, since some of the main dialogue about these threats come from computer screens and lines delivered from off camera, that's means it was almost certainly a later change done in post.  The film is only 96 minutes, which is a bit short for a comic book movie, but given the plotting, it's almost certainly because they have done a "oh no, this isn't working, make it as short as we can so we can have as many screenings before word of mouth kills it!" job on it.  As for the writing, dear god this appallingly written..  The titular characters are being held prisoner in this hospital (the most overdone spooky hospital I have ever seen, it makes no sense for this story for it to be this run down and blatantly evil!), but one of them can teleport, and is shown doing it several times.  Seriously, did no-one during the writing pick up that one?  Or was there an explanation left on the cutting room floor?  Mind, the same character later on just plain doesn't use their other, more offensive powers for quite a while during the climax, so that later when they do let loose with it, you just end up going "why didn't they do that before?  Did they just forget they could do that?".

Now I should mention that I've only read a few comics over the years that featured these characters, so I'm not coming to this with much of a fan perspective, but I know enough (partially from listening to Jay and Miles Xplain the X-Men) to spot just how badly this serves some of the characters.  Again, 100% fidelity to the source material isn't always a good thing, but you know what's worse?  Making one a massive racist for no good reason.  Or whitewashing another one of them.  Now ages ago I did a reference in a review of Days of Future Past to a character I kind of wanted to see on screen.  Lo and behold they turn up here... and it's actually kind of terrible, because it makes zero sense for them to be there, or to have their given name, and it means that another fan favourite character (who also got shafted in DoFP) has had something cool of theirs from the comics stolen from them again!

This one is pretty diabolically bad.  I have barely talked about the horror aspect, mainly because that's a complete wash-out too.  I got some very funny looks from my few fellow audience members, because a lot of the "scary" scenes actually made me laugh, the sort Crow does at the start of this clip.  The mook monsters and final boss that turn up for the climax have got to be some of the silliest looking creatures I have ever seen in a film that wants to be taken seriously.  That just sums up this whole thing; it obviously wants to be this big new trendsetter, mixing in horror and superhero tropes, but the mix just plain does not work here.   Boring for the most part, annoying or laughable in brief moments at others, after all this time, the Fox X-Men films have really hit a true rock bottom with this one, and that's saying a lot.  Again, just pretend that these things ended with Logan instead, and if you want a better superhero horror mashup, go rent Brightburn.

Oh, just one more thing!  

This one has the teens watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer at various points.  It's never a good idea to show the audience something that will make them go a) "there's something I'd rather be watching" and b) "that show did this same sort of thing much better".  That goes double if you straight up duplicate the scenes you showed!