Let’s make it clear: ‘The New Mutants’ It’s not a perfect movie, but its departure from the codes imposed on immovable tablets of stone by the MCU is absolutely refreshing. Without the irregularity of tones and styles of Sony’s Spiderverse, without the abysmal aesthetic levels of the latest Fox mutant movies, ‘The New Mutants’ (which you can see on Disney +) does not have that neat finish and without edges of the movies Disney’s Marvel, but it is a very estimable youth horror adventure that dares to distance itself from the usual superhero clichés.
To get started, takes classic Marvel mutant canon and applies it far more successfully than the X-Men movies (even the best): Mutants aren’t superheroes, they’re fringe creatures. And if Wolverine and company are a good metaphor for groups marginalized due to race, sex, religion, ideology or whatever, the New Mutants are the perfect symbol of the age of misunderstanding, physical changes and rebellion: the adolescence.
And to tell the story, the film is based on one of the best mutant comics of the eighties, the Mystic Bear saga of ‘The New Mutants’, written and drawn by two giants of the genre: Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz. To shape it, he takes us to another eighties icon: ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’. Specifically, to the third installment of the saga, the one that takes place in a hospital where the sleep disorders of a group of problematic adolescents are studied. That film served as an apocryphal version of the X Patrol, and ‘The New Mutants’ returns the ball to it by recovering its nightmare scenes and its hospitable and dark setting.
Thanks to an excellent cast (where Anya Taylor-Joy, Maisie Williams and Blu Hunt stand out, in particular) and a good dosage of terror and action, we have Fox’s last great superhero movie, and one that deserved better luck than arriving at the time of transition to Disney. Even with its rhythm problems and the certainty that it deserved an even more nightmarish and adult tone, the result is totally vindicatable and its irregular but combative texture puts it far above most of the perfect, crystalline and inoffensive Disney Marvel productions. .
