New Mutants Trailer Breakdown

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One of the curious things about film success in the 2020s is that “quiet victories” have become more and more prevalent.  That’s more the result of Geek Media spending a lot of time talking up the loud victories than anything else.  For instance, the X-Men franchise is a great example of something quietly successful.  Outwardly the franchise is considered mostly past its prime and running on goodwill and fumes.  

However, a lot of that is simply because the main film series doesn’t draw a lot of interest in the online circles, meanwhile, the spin-off material like Deadpool, Logan, and Legion have been making big waves and spawning imitators left and right.  A lot of that is that Fox seems more willing to experiment on the job with the X-Men peripherals, probably because they assume they aren’t going to be successful anyway so might as well get weird with it.  That certainly seems like the attitude at play with the latest X-Men spin-off flick The New Mutants whose trailer has revealed it to be…a teen horror flick? 

I’m going to be honest here, I’m a little flummoxed at this track of adaptation.  I get the impetus to do something different with New Mutants, especially given they’re basically a bunch of no-name heroes to the public at large.  I even get the decision to take a more horror-oriented track given the presence of Magick on the team.  I’ve gone over the group roster in the past but if you need a refresher, Magick is the sister of Colossus and has the power to manipulate magic and open portals to a hell like dimension.  

She played a big role in a series of X-Men events involving demons, most notably Inferno.  There’s also the presence of Dani Moonstar, a first nations hero with illusion powers who also sported a magic backstory that was full of monsters and horror dimensions.  There’s certainly precedent for the spooky route but not really the spooky route they seem to have gone with.

The trailer is a little all over the place but from the broad strokes, it seems this version of the New Mutants is a group of teen mutants locked up in an anti-mutant asylum of some kind for medical study.  The institute is run by Alice Braga, who is pretty much always great no matter what she’s in, playing the character of Cecilia Reyes.  

Reyes is one of the many “mutants that don’t matter” as I call them, the vast backlog of D-list mutants that fill out A LOT of the X-Men’s vast mythos.  Reyes is a bit more notable for being a latinx woman but she also has the unfortunate origin of being created by Scott Lobdell- the real worst thing about the ‘90s and I say that as a proud ‘90s comic defender.  New Mutants looks to be jettisoning all of Reyes’ comic origin stuff anyway, which is for the best. 

What’s interesting is that it’s a little unclear why all the spookiness is befalling the institute here.  Initially, my guess was that it was just a creepy and hellish government institute because that’s the kind of horrifying inefficiency that tends to pepper government projects in the world of mutants.  However, the persistent rumor is that this film will be adapting the so-called “Demon Bear” story from the New Mutants comics.  

I don’t really know if that’s right or not but it seems like an odd approach regardless.  Like, the Demon Bear’s name is pretty literal, it’s a gigantic bear with slightly exaggerated claws and control over a limbo realm of nightmares.  I suppose the institute could exist within the Demon Bear’s nightmare realm but even that seems like an odd and difficult to execute twist all around.  Just watch this trailer again and try to imagine that a giant Bear is behind it all. 

A Bear Is Doing This

Overall I don’t think the New Mutants are the right team to bridge the superhero-horror film gap, mainly because they have superpowers.  Horror films thrive on making the characters helpless, even within the third act when they fight back, and that’s just not a circle you can square with superhuman abilities.  It’s hard for anything to stay frightening if in the final act the heroes form together into a team of super-teens and beat it up real bad.  

Even if they’re going to go the Fan4stic route and have the superpowers read as body-horror it’ll have to be persistent body horror, which ruins the whole thing.  Sure, it might be scary to see Sunspot light on fire and crisp up the first time but when he has to just walk around that way or use that ability to punch a giant bear it loses a lot of what made it frightening.  

I understand outwardly that the film is drawing a lot of inspiration from the Nightmare on Elm Street series (the faces through the wall moment is a pretty clear reference.)  That makes conceptual sense given that series’ dive into dark fantasy with Dream Warriors and Dream Master, which makes me suspect the Demon Bear side of things will probably end up downplayed with a bigger emphasis on Moonstar’s illusion powers as what’s ACTUALLY causing the haunting.  

However, a lot of the actual scares look to be more modern, which I’d say actually misses the layer of retro charm that makes the later Elm Street films more enjoyable.  Basically, it looks like a Conjuring movie that’s going through the motions of a late period Nightmare on Elm Street film all while also acting as an X-Men movie, which is a lot of plates to try and keep spinning. 

I think I’m going to end up respecting The New Mutants more than I am actually am liking it.  There’s a lot of ambition up on the screen here but ambition only takes you so far.  Under the slap in the face surprise of seeing an out and proud superhero horror film, there are a lot of moving parts that don’t seem to be meshing and no amount of impressive gloss is ultimately going to be able to hide that.  

I’m still hoping we get a good movie out of this but I’m severely tempering that hope given the nature of the parts of this project.  Teen superheroes fighting a giant bear in a slick modern haunted house as modeled on late ‘80s slasher fair is certainly an original pitch but we’ll see if it’s original because it’s good or just because no one else has been dumb enough to try. 

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