Watching The New Mutants (possible spoilers), the 13th and, as of now, final movie of the X-Men franchise, I was reminded of my joyful, eager experience watching the very first live action mutant adaptation. I’m talking, of course, about the Generation X tv movie.
How exciting that was when I was a kid! The X-Men universe, from the comics and the cartoon I loved so much, in live action! There was Jubilee! And I squealed with joy when they mentioned Professor X. I was 8 and there were no X-Men movies and I would take whatever I could get. It’s so odd to think that I wanted an X-Men movie so much, and now we have 13, sometimes up to two in one year.
Josh Boone’s The New Mutants is like a cross between Generation X and the fantastic show Legion. Like the former, it’s about younger, lesser sung characters but explicitly in the same universe as Professor Charles Xavier and his X-Men, who get shout-outs. Like Noah Hathaway’s show, it brings the mutants to an asylum and forces them to wrestle with demons within and without. It’s a contained, cerebral film, almost surreally so. There are only six characters and one location. Very different from the epic scale superhero saga we’re used to.
We remember that it all started with the Charles Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters, and finally here is a movie where the main characters are children, confused teens coming to terms with their powers, their guilt, and alienation. Our main cast are not the hardened heroes like Wolverine or erudite leaders like Professor X. Rather, they have more in common with Rogue, still coming to terms with their mutations and its consequences. There’s Roberto (Henry Braga), who puts on a cool front but is tortured by his inability to get close to a girl without burning her up. Sam (Charlie Heaton) who made it out of the coal mines of Kentucky but not in a good way, and has to live with the memory of killing his father with powers he couldn’t control. Ilyana Rasputin (Anya Taylor-Joy), Colossus’s magical sister, always with her faithful dragon puppet Lockheed can play both bully and heroine. Rahne (Maise Williams) an Irish girl filled with religious turmoil can turn into a wolf, but wrestles with when to you it. Finally, there’s our lead, Dani (Blu Hunt), the only survivor from her reservation, who manifests everyone’s fears from out of the nightmare realm into the physical. Dani’s father (Adam Beach) told her that old parable of the two bears inside all of us, the good and the bad. Which do you feed?
This is very much a character-driven story. The antagonist, Dr. Reyes (Alice Braga, niece of The Spider Woman), is not some over-the-top megalomaniac with dreams of world domination, but something of a victim herself. Everything she does is for her sinister superior, and there a poignant vulnerability to this character even as she oppresses the younger mutants. There are a lot of subtle and poignant human moments. Rahne had a bad experience with a priest who mistook her mutation for witchcraft, but she has not lost her Catholicism. In one of the most affecting scenes, she goes to the confession booth in the empty chapel and confesses her sins to a priest she imagines as there. Dr. Reyes’s cage has the trappings of the things these kids miss, but they have to bring the heart themselves. Illyana is the funnest performance. Anya Taylor-Joy, so excellent as Cassie Cook in Split and Glass, brings a very different energy to another superhero movie, alternately bratty, coquettish, and frightened by the terrifying Smiling Man, and capable of stepping up to the role in the frantic climax.
And what a climax it is! There is something about these X-Men movie climax’s that’s so much more soulful and meaningful than the Avenger series. What it comes down to is that each character is given their specific job to do and aren’t just fighting off a generic army of interchangeable CGIs. The Demon Bear here is of course CGI, but defeating it is a matter of hope and teamwork, and by the end, we see what Dani and her friends are feeding.
More than Logan (clips of which are included) or Dark Phoenix, The New Mutants is the true follow-up to the post-credits scene of X-Men: Apocalypse, which tantalizingly teased Mr. Sinister via the Essex Corp. The New Mutants takes place some time between the two movies, and the concept of imprisoning mutant children and exploiting them for their DNA. Whereas Logan had in the role of the imprisoners Dr. Zander Rice (Richard E. Grant) and other human supremacists, this film features mutants like Dr. Reyes and, implicitly, Nathaniel Essex, enslaving and exploiting their own kind in a world that hates them all. It’s a more fascinating and poignant type of villainy, and all the more disturbing as a result.
The ending is hopeful, for these characters as they band together and go out to freedom and the potential of a better tomorrow. What is the future of the franchise now that it has been absorbed by Disney? I can only speculate. Obviously Ryan Reynolds is game to come back as Deadpool and everyone wants that. Evan Peters and his Quicksilver are a possibility. Who knows what Sam Raimi’s brilliant madness will show us of the multiverse? I don’t know. But I do know that from early childhood, playing with Sabertooth and Apocalypses action figures and dressing as Wolverine for Halloween, to taking turns shouting out the character names with my little sister as we watched the opening to the animated series (she got Beast, I of course got Wolverine) to waiting eagerly for each new cinematic outing from adolescence through young adulthood, often with my mom after we ran a half marathon, to meeting the late, great Stan “The Man” Lee in Pasadena and thanking him for creating X-Men, to putting on a New Mutant themed half-marathon to raise over $500 for epilepsy awareness and running from Alhambra to Hollywood and my waiting girlfriend, the Marvel mutants have been a part of my life in one way. I don’t think that’s going to change. This will continue. I have hope.
And that’s the bear I’ll feed.