For date night last Friday my wife picked the movie "New Mutants". We had both wanted to see this movie, but we both also remembered how many times it was pushed back due to various reasons. That is usually never a good sign. I cannot recall a movie being wonderful after many reshoots and pushbacks. In fact, it seems you only ever hear about that stuff when it happens because the movies are not good.

That, unfortunately, happens to be the case with "New Mutants". From what I knew this movie was supposed to come out in 2018. I am pretty sure that Aarya was filming this movie as "Game of Thrones" was ending. Then it was stopped due to reshoots. Then they had to do more reshoots. Then they had to recast some roles. Then the pandemic hit. Then it got pushed back even further due to variants and other circumstances involved with COVID. Then it was just kind of dumped in the late summer months of 2020 and that release was met with very poor reviews from critics and fans. We opted to not go to the theaters because I still will not go to a theater to see movies I really want to see. We decided we would wait. And to be quite honest, I had forgotten about the movie. But it was on HBO the other night and my wife asked me to record it so we could watch it on date night. I did, and we proceeded to watch after the kids went to bed.

I have to say, I agree with most of the criticisms that the movie got from the general public. "New Mutants" was very dour and sad and filled with messy dialogue and action scenes. There were times when I didn't realize what was going on, and it is not like this is a complicated premise. It should have been pretty easy. These are the mutants that are supposed to take over for the X-Men. Aarya should have been cool as hell. She was a shapeshifting werewolf. But I couldn't get over her hair or her weird Irish accent. Anna Taylor Joy should have been dope, she had a sweet power, but she had some of the corniest dialogue and her backstory was the thing of nightmares. The guy from "Stranger Things" had an even worse accent than Aarya and I could not take anything about him seriously. His whole backstory was absurd. The fire dude, I have no idea who he was, had this weird tonal change halfway through the movie, becoming the "funny guy" out of nowhere. It was very confusing. And the doctor, she was in the new "Suicide Squad", was so easily pointed out as the true villain from the jump. Even the main girl, the newest of the new mutants, was just too sad and gloomy throughout the entirety of the movie. There were some cool things they did. I liked the new girl and Aarya being a couple. I find it comforting that these superhero movies are letting the characters be gay or bi. They do not all have to be straight. I also did like Taylor Joy fighting the big ass dream bear at the end. But that was about it.

I should have liked this movie. I am an X-Men fan. They were the first superhero movies I watched and really enjoyed. This should have been in my wheelhouse. But it took itself too seriously. It was too dark in tone. There was no real fun, and this was not on the level of "Logan", which wasn't made as a fun superhero movie. "New Mutants" was a big miss for me. I should have known because of all the pre release stuff, but I still wanted to give it a chance due to my love of the X-Men and all things mutant in the comic book world. But this did not work. Oh well, they canceled the rest of the trilogy they were going to make, and maybe that means they will go back to the drawing board to try to fix it. My fingers will be crossed until then.

Ty

Ty is the Pop Culture editor for SeedSing and the other host of the X Millennial Man Podcast.

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