The New Mutants

And The Prison Bunk

For years in prison, I subscribed to whatever film magazine was still being published. During this period, I kept seeing Fox’s “The New Mutants” appear as a coming attraction, through 2016 all the way into 2020. Along the way, a Marvel event movie from Fox became something Disney just dumped on a weekend, in empty theaters abandoned during a lethal pandemic. Not what this young, promising cast envisioned when they signed what were probably multi-film contracts.

Unlike something like the bewildering “Madame Web” (to use one specific wayward Marvel example), you can see how “The New Mutants” would work. The whole point of the X-Men comics was that these were young, hormonal characters still figuring out the world, still understanding their bodies. And then 2000’s “X-Men” started a whole cinematic universe with a school populated by the likes of James Marsden. Has any young adult looked more mature and confident than James Marsden in 2000? I have my doubts. “New Mutants”, thusly, is populated by an exciting and diverse cast of youngsters. The vibe is one of teen dysfunction, but with this specific cast it feels like a fresh formula, and not just another franchise movie.

These kids aren’t at Xavier’s School, but in fact an asylum of sorts, run by a superficially-benevolent doctor named Cecilia Reyes, a comics callback in name only, because why use an original character when you can just take a name for the comics and then create a characterization with absolutely no roots in the comics? Never understood this. Like, let’s make a Superman, but he’s a chain-smoking jogger with the convenient alter ego of Clark Kent? You’re giving her the Reyes name as a shout-out to the few fans who remember her, but then providing a completely different character for the same fans you’re allegedly servicing. What’s the point of the actual fan-service? Look, fans, we too know the names of characters, and nothing else! 

Either make the character somewhat recognizable, or invent a new one. Switch the race or the gender if need be, but the philosophies and motivations of the character have likely persisted over decades – you can keep those. Reyes, the rare Puerto Rican X-Men character, dates back to 1997, and bears no resemblance to the person Alice Braga plays here. It’s especially galling because you could have easily replaced her character and motivations with that of classic X-Men villain Mister Sinister, who had already been teased by earlier films in the franchise. There are even references to Sinister here, and yet, he feels sheepishly under wraps for a future film that would never materialize, just as he was echoed in “X-Men: Apocalypse” and “Logan”. I would not have liked losing a Puerto Rican character, as us Puerto Ricans are never in these types of movies. But I also wouldn’t have rewritten a Puerto Rican character just to make her into more of a plot device than a person. Also, I would have thrown in the X-Man Skin, who is Puerto Rican in canon, I believe, though that has been disputed. Because I am selfish about my representation.

The group of teens here are more familiar for their comic pseudonyms, with Moonstar, Cannonball, Illyana, Sunspot and Wolfsbane represented. Their skill sets don’t necessarily compliment each other – one shoots himself like a rocket, one becomes a werewolf, etc. Which fits the ungainly nature of the movie, as not only are these kids completely alien to each other, but they have no idea exactly what is happening to them. “New Mutants” never becomes scary (or exciting, or anything above amusing – director Josh Boone and the footage he assembled seems superficially flavorless, trapped within the visual language of these tight corners and narrow hallways). But the effort is commendable, particularly alongside those X-Men films that pretty much always reminded audiences how apparently awesome it was to be extremely good-looking and develop dangerous abilities that made you an alleged social pariah. 

It’s interesting how, for all the X-Men narratives about bigotry and segregation, the movies have depicted the mutant lifestyle as pretty wild, a nonstop fireworks-filled adventure. There’s really only one notable human that despises them, and that’s WIlliam Stryker, affiliated with the Canadian government. This movie, which came out after “Dark Phoenix” (which depicted a world where the American government has the X-Men on-call for… space missions?) reminds us that these are scary abilities, and they spark scarier reactions within the behavior of frightened humans. Unfortunately, this is shown through manifestations of trauma that attack the team, captured through an onslaught of undefined CGI creatures. It reminds you of just how much lowered the stakes are, and it also tips the audience off to the truth we all know: CGI can be fun, colorful, even unique, but if it’s recognizably pixels it will never be scary.

Basic cable helped me keep up with the Fox X-Men franchise, so “New Mutants” was the last one the studio produced, and the last one I happened to see. While I was incarcerated, Xavier’s students popped up in the colorful but thinly-plotted “X-Men: Apocalypse” and the scattershot, ungainly “Dark Phoenix”, both films of which had their considerable pleasures mostly due to not being made under the oppressive editorial hand of the larger Marvel machine. I also experienced the admirably juvenile “Deadpool” films, which seemed to materialize on FX nearly every weekend. Aside from Scott Summers releasing a gnarly f-bomb in “Dark Phoenix”, the greatest pleasure in all of these movies has to be the fierceness of Anya Taylor-Joy’s Illyana in “New Mutants”, nearly stealing the film single-handedly with entirely too much movie-star swag that we haven’t really seen enough since in these franchise films.

I could relate to the visions and the trauma these essentially-incarcerated youths experienced in this film – I had no idea it would be something of a prison movie. Whether it was the twelve-man rooms of my first federal location, or open-air 100-man situation at my second, you were always aware you were sleeping in the presence of angry, sometimes disturbed men. If you stayed awake and had nothing to muffle your ears (I was particularly partial to music), you could hear men speaking in their sleep, grumbling, sometimes moaning. One fight erupted because one man believed he had heard another man pleasuring himself – certainly a possibility, but at the time unproven. Perhaps a situation of one man releasing his anxieties upon another. Most people are too polite to note the night terrors of a neighbor. That being said, I can’t be fully certain I wasn’t making noise in my sleep either. Nor can I rule out still having these same terrors today. The nightmares persist.

I can tell you the recurring fear in sleep – falling off one’s bunk. No one tells you this, but in every institution, the metal planks that would be bunk beds were always just a little too high for someone with an average height. You’d have to raise your leg to stand on a plank next to the lower bunk in order to propel your weight upwards onto the top bunk. And if you fell off a top bunk, the fall could certainly kill, considering your mattress may be eight to nine feet from the ground. I still remember, across the hall, one man falling off and landing on his head. I couldn’t see through the hallway, but I heard people surrounding him, trying to care for him. I listened in the hopes I would hear him, though I couldn’t – people’s voices suggested he was quietly reactive and conscious. After a few minutes, however, a puddle of blood somehow began sliding down the corridor towards our wing. I can’t seem to chase that image from my dreams.